


Bound By Rusted Chains

by Cthulhtist



Category: Friday the 13th Part VII The New Blood, Friday the 13th Series (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Attempted Murder, Canon-Typical Violence, Classic bag-head Jason, F/M, Gun Violence, Jason-style justice, LOTS of violence, Mental Instability, Past Violence, Quasi-governmental agencies suck, Round 2: FIGHT!, Someone needs his hockey mask back, Supernatural Elements, Telekinesis/Psychokinesis, Trauma Recovery, Uncomfortable alliance, i just love these two, regaining agency, tags will be updated as this progresses, undead Jason Voorhees, vengeance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:34:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 46,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23435512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cthulhtist/pseuds/Cthulhtist
Summary: What happens when an irresistible force and an immovable object meet again?After the horrors she endured at Crystal Lake, an almost completely broken Tina Shepard was institutionalised in a mental hospital before a quasi-governmental agency she knew only as the Institute found her and kept her captive under lock and key, medications, and armed guards for years as a research subject and to train her to control and expand her telekinetic powers.  Unable to take it any longer, she escaped and fled to the last place she believed they would think to look for her - back to Crystal Lake.  Meanwhile, the infamous Camp Blood Killer, Jason Voorhees, has been held dormant if not actually dead in the lake where he drowned as a child since Tina’s dead father dragged him down in chains.Round Two: FIGHT!
Relationships: Tina Shepard/Jason Voorhees
Comments: 13
Kudos: 15





	1. Capricious, Cruel Guilt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments, questions, and criticism (even totally non-constructive criticism) welcome and appreciated!
> 
> Obviously Tina, Jason, Crystal Lake/Forest Green, and everything from the Friday the 13th media series belong to their respective creators, not me. The Institute and related stuff is all that belongs to me.

Bound by Rusted Chains

Chapter I - Capricious, Cruel Guilt

  
It was never a conscious thought in her mind - to return to that awful, accursed place of nightmares where the people she loved most had been slaughtered - after she fled the Institute under cover of darkness, but guilt could be as capricious as it was cruel. It was guilt that dragged her reluctant feet to trudge through the overgrown lot where a home once stood and down to the lake that had proven itself all too willing to give up its dead. It was all her fault, Tina Shephard knew, from her father’s death almost fifteen years before to all the bloodshed and carnage wrought by what her mourning had dredged forth from the depths of Crystal Lake when Dr. Crews’ selfish plan to exploit her brought her and her mother back to the source of her guilt seven years later. Another seven years had passed since the horror, and somehow she was back.

The water she gazed into was clear and green beneath the faintly distorted reflection of her face, still and calm despite the breeze tangling her feathery blonde hair that was longer now than the last time she had stood here, but she could not see the bottom. Perversely, she felt a sudden urge to kick off her shoes and dip her toes into the placid water, but she was long accustomed to not acting upon her impulses. She might not have been a particularly vibrant teenager the last time she stood at the edge of the lake like this, skipping rocks with only moderate success across the surface, but now, time and sorrow had worn her down to a pale, faded semblance of the girl she had been. The young Tina who first moved to Crystal Lake with her parents had been troubled by her father’s drunken rages and subtle, almost unnoticeable hints of the strange, powerful, destructive force that flowed through her but which had not yet burst forth, but she had been a mostly normal and mostly happy ten-year-old before a single simple, childish outburst plunged her father into the lake beneath the great weight of the covered pier that toppled onto him as she howled out her regret. Seven years of doctors, psychiatric medications, and long stints in-patient on hospital mental wards had failed to cure her nightmares or her guilt, but she had still possessed hope back then. The years that followed the murders, the first two spent in a chemical straightjacket and then the previous five up until mere days earlier spent subjected to ceaseless testing during what was effectively incarceration at the Institute, had murdered whatever hope had survived that awful night as brutally effectively as the monster she pulled out of the lake had killed his victims that weekend.

Afterward, in the wake of all that death, well-meaning people tried to reassure her with hollow platitudes like “time heals all wounds.” She was too polite and too afraid of looking completely crazy to laugh in their faces, but she knew better. Time had not healed her dead parents or any of the others who might have and almost had become her friends, all of whom had died because of her; they remained as dead today as ever. And time had not healed the holes ripped through her soul or the ever-hungry guilt feasting upon her heart’s remains.

Tina wrapped her arms around herself, the only sort of hug she had felt in the past five years spent in the coldly clinical care of the Institute, trying to ease the deep, throbbing ache of the guilt within her. Was the broken wood of the dock her mind had somehow ripped from its supports and cast down still down there, or had the contractors who cleared away the rubble after the explosion taken that away, too? Were  _ they _ still down there somewhere, her father and the monster, bound together by those rusted chains, she wondered.

Tina felt simultaneously a sense that almost resembled peace and profoundly uncomfortable there on the shore of Crystal Lake. She thought this was the last place the people from the Institute would think she would have gone after she had forced her way out through locked steel doors ripped from their hinges like so much papier-mâché and past the dozens of armed guards tasked with keeping her safe by keeping her confined, by deadly force if necessary, whose cattle prods had pressed into their own bodies, whose fingers had frozen against the triggers they could not pull and whose bullets had been unable to escape from the barrels in which they had exploded, given the rôle Crystal Lake played in making her into … whatever and whoever she was now. That they would try to track her down was a given, she knew. The doctors and scientists might not say it to her face, but she  _ knew _ . She was just too dangerous to be allowed to walk free in their world, not even with the degree of control she had developed over the years in their so-called “care.”

So she had returned here, to  _ his  _ world.

Using the search engine on the laptop she had taken on that last night of captivity from the nurse who came to give her the evening cocktail of medications they told her would help her to sleep without dreaming (apparently she was a thief as well as a killer, Tina had realised and then immediately accepted in that moment), she had learned that no massacres had reportedly occurred in Wessex County, New Jersey in the years since the slaughter to which she had borne witness as a teenager, so she did not think that  _ thing  _ had escaped the lake. Even so, this remained his land. These woods, this lake, it all belonged to the fiend in the hockey mask. It all belonged to Jason Voorhees. The empty, boarded up vacation homes and cabins decaying as the forest reclaimed them beside the lake that she had passed told more eloquently than any brief news article that this was no place for living people.

Did she actually count as a person any longer? She was not sure.

Would a veritable army of psychiatrists and researchers or dozens of black-clad men with tasers, cattle prods, and machine guns have been so necessary “to ensure the safety” of a slight, quiet, shy blonde woman in her 20s if she were just a person like everyone else? 

The lies they told her as easily as they breathed had made her head spin in the beginning, but over the years of confinement she had grown accustomed to not taking anything at face value, not believing anything she was told. There were kernels of truth concealed within the lies, of course, and she tried to discern what those truth might be as a mental exercise, but she felt she could never be certain enough which were truth and which were lies, so it was safest for her not to believe any of it. They claimed it was all for her benefit and that everything they did was meant just to help her - and she  _ knew  _ she needed help to cope with everything she had seen, everything she had done. But not even the Hypnocil they fed her every night had been enough to stop her nightmares. They had helped her learn to control the impossible power she possessed, true, but they had not helped  _ her _ . They had just tried to teach her to control the power inside her so they could control her, hoping to use her.

She was so sick of being used by people who did not really care about her. She was sick of the pretending and the lies.

Being here, at the site of so much violent death, she expected to be overwhelmed by the terrible memories, but really, it was no worse than anywhere else. The natural beauty surrounding her was actually rather captivating.

She did not know how long she had stood there at the water’s edge, having neglected to take the nurse’s watch when she took his keys and wallet, but she realised that she felt chilly. Looking up, she saw that the sun was sinking beneath the treetops. She knew that the light would not last much longer, and she had to figure out where she would spend the night. She did not want to spend another night sleeping curled up in the back seat of the stolen car. When she took the nurse’s wallet, she was hoping he might have enough cash to buy a decent tent and some supplies, but she had only found enough to buy a change of clothes and a bedraggled sleeping bag from a Goodwill in a small town she passed through early in her drive, and some groceries she purchased along the way. She knew better than to use any of his credit cards. The transactions would have been far too easy to track, and if they had seen her purchase camping gear they would have figured out where she was going. Probably. Maybe. Anyway, it was just too big a risk to take for such a small reward.

Slowly, she made her way back to the car through the waist-high vegetation where a house once stood. The house next door that Nick’s cousin’s friends had rented for a birthday party still stood, but she could not bring herself to consider staying there. Plus, wherever she stayed, she would have to be able to hide the car. The thought of returning to the Institute was worse even than the thought of staying in the house where she had seen so many people die. She slid into the beater she had found unlocked at a gas station with the keys in the ignition after abandoning the nurse’s Prius and proceeded to drive along the crumbling dirt road circling the lake in search of a suitable hiding place where she could stay and regroup and make a better plan than remaining in that haunted forest. It only took a few minutes of driving to find a small cottage that might have been painted a pale blue judging by the flaking paint but which was now grey with mildew and bedecked with once-white gingerbread trim that she thought would do well enough for the time being. The first storey windows were boarded up but the upper floor windows all retained their glass and the sagging roof looked solid enough - and it had a detached garage.

Perfect.

Had it been necessary for Tina to raise the warped garage door manually, she would have failed miserably, as she was slender (possibly more so than the last time she visited the area, though she had grown an inch taller since then, but she had not cared to look at the numbers on the scale during her weekly health checkups in years) and not terribly strong physically, but she thought about her last time at Crystal Lake, picturing Maddy as she had last seen her, nailed to a tree not far from here, the hideously contorted dead face she had seen frozen forever in the terror of her last moments above her torn-out throat, and the door rolled up with a hideous shriek. Yes, they had at least taught her some control at the Institute, how to visualise and direct her emotions instead of letting them control her, though she felt almost no gratitude to them even for that. She knew they had not trained her to help her, but to be able to use her, probably for some nefarious purpose. She parked the car inside, the garage door rolling back down behind her as she approached the house, and climbed the steps onto the wide porch with her bags of groceries and supplies, stepping carefully in case even her slight weight should prove too much for the weathered boards beneath her feet. Opening the locked, warped front door frozen in its rotted frame was just as easy for her as the garage door had been. It swung open on rusted hinges that groaned and squealed in protest before her without so much as a touch, closing and locking itself behind her, and she walked into the musty, dark front room where she set down the few bags she had and pulled out the cheap plastic lantern she bought with the nurse’s money, hoping it would produce enough light to be useful.

Using the pale light it produced, she explored the long-vacant home, inspecting it cautiously. The floor beneath her felt reassuringly solid, though what she found was disconcerting, killing the elation she had felt upon discovering the cottage. On the first floor, she found a kitchen with dead, harvest gold appliances from the 1960s, dingy Formica countertops, a linoleum-coated floor curling up at the seams, and a spindly card table with two rickety wooden chairs, and the only other room aside from the foyer, presumably the living room, was worse. The carpet, of an indeterminate colour that might have been dark green, squished beneath her feet as if it was wet, but when she bent down to touch it, it felt dry, and the sagging floral couch was spotted with mildew. Wooden panelling was peeling off the walls and dingy lace curtains drooled in tatters over the boarded up windows. Tina considered ripping down the boards to let in more light, but that would also allow people to look inside through them, which she thought unwise. After making these discoveries, any interest she might have felt to raise the trapdoor cut into the kitchen floor so she could check out the basement beneath died. Maybe she could look down there tomorrow, in the daylight.

Disappointed by what she discovered on the first floor, she ventured upstairs where she entered a claustrophobically narrow hallway dead ending at a triangular window, with three regular, rectangular windows cut out of one wall and three doors in the opposite. Two of the rooms were evidently bedrooms, but she could not bring herself to consider sleeping in either. The stink of mould emanating from the bare, stained mattress lying crooked upon the metal frame of the twin bed in one was off-putting, but when she swung the lantern into the second, larger bedroom, something that was probably furry yet appeared to have a scaly tail, although she could not bear to look long enough to see it clearly,  _ moved _ in the centre of the dark comforter the previous occupants had abandoned on the full-sized bed. At least there was no gross carpet up here, she thought, desperate to find  _ something _ positive to negate her horror at whatever she had glimpsed on the bed.

Shuddering with disgust, Tina peered into the tiny bathroom, and she finally got to breathe a sigh of relief. Stepping inside, she saw that there were cobwebs in the corners that might have housed generations of spiders, but she saw no evidence of current occupation, and aside from rusty fixtures and the layer of dust coating the tub and the sink, it all looked surprisingly clean. Without touching anything, she forced the handles to turn, and after a truly awful groan that shook the pipes beneath the sink, dark water spurted from the faucet that quickly turned clear. The toilet even flushed! She had expected the water to have been turned off along with the electricity, so this discovery conjured up a smile to light her face.

Maybe it would not be so bad here, after all, for a few days. Just enough time to make a better plan.

She did  _ not _ want to stay there even a millisecond longer than necessary.

Still smiling though exhaustion from three days of almost nonstop driving with the fear that she would be caught and forced to return to the Institute gnawing at her guts the whole time, she went back downstairs to figure out where she would sleep tonight. Obviously not in either bedroom or on the couch, which did not leave her many options.

After pacing in nervous circles around the two rooms on the first floor, thinking, she finally decided that just laying out her sleeping bag in the kitchen would be her best bet. With only a thought, the small table and chairs slid to join the couch in the living room, freeing up enough floor space for her to lie down and stretch out comfortably - something she anticipated with more relish than sleeping on peeling linoleum ordinarily would warrant after spending two nights curled up on the backseat of a late ‘80s or early ‘90s Camry (she would never claim to be an authority on anything to do with motor vehicles), uncomfortable and barely able to get any sleep at all due to the anxiety that a cadre of black-clad men armed with tranquiliser darts or worse might sneak up on her and return her to the “research facility” that was really a veritable prison and which she had finally managed to escape only so recently. She felt like an enormous weight had been lifted from off her chest despite the sheer exhaustion still pressing down upon her.

The worn, curling linoleum of the kitchen floor was not quite filthy, but Tina was very pleased to find a worn but still serviceable broom leaning against the pantry wall, alongside a mop and bucket. She was too worn out even to consider mopping, but there was always tomorrow. When she tried to make the broom move, she found she was just too tired for what should have been a simple task, so she rolled her sleeves up over her elbows and proceeded to sweep the dust and dirt into the entranceway, not even bothering to push it out the front door. That, too, could wait until tomorrow. She figured she probably had about ten days before anybody from the Institute would consider searching for her here in which to come up with a more permanent plan.

She laid out her secondhand sleeping bag and pillow on the kitchen floor and crawled inside, finding both to be rather lumpy but warm, definitely acceptable until she could figure out how to obtain something better. She laid her head on the pillow, her hand snaking out to turn off the lantern when she failed to do so with her mind. Before she could pull it back into the sleeping bag, she was sound asleep.

However …

Unbeknownst to Tina, her three days on the run without the medications she was given every night coupled with the massive surges of adrenaline and fear pumping through her body had finally entirely purged her system of the drugs whose purpose she did not fully comprehend.

The nightmares haunting her sleep came, as they always did. As usual, Tina was seventeen again, standing over Crystal Lake on the dock, wondering if her father was still down there and wishing with the entirety of her being that he could return to her. Several yards past the end of the dock, the water bubbled and churned with a force she did not, could not understand. All she could think about was the terror on her father’s face as the old covered dock shook itself to pieces beneath his feet, taking him down with it.

“I’m sorry, daddy. I’m so sorry! I wish I could bring you back!”

Her grief and guilt reached out into the lake like fingers, searching, probing, seeking for her father. To her shock, she felt a body, a man trapped down there deep within the lake. In the dream, she knew what she found down there was death incarnate, but she could not stop it from happening again. 

“Daddy?”

The power emanating from within her broken heart filled that decaying form with life stolen from her own body then snapped the chain that held the monster down in the cold depths of the lake.

She was crying for her father, but she knew it was not he that fought its way to the surface with a splash. It was a man, if such a creature can properly be called that, clad in rotted clothes, wearing a battered hockey mask to cover the horror that remained of his face, and the large, inhumanly strong hand that struck the water when he surfaced was just as rotted as his clothing, white phalanges exposed through the remaining patches of his skin that would so soon be wet with blood. Unlike when this had happened in reality, she  _ knew  _ the horror and pain he brought with him, the carnage and death to come. And unconsciousness did not come to her in her dreams bearing its blessed oblivion.

Writhing violently within the sleeping bag as she slept, Tina moaned a single word.

“Daddy.”

The power housed within her, unfettered by drugs or the limitations of her waking mind and fuelled by her guilt, surged outward through the walls of the cottage, winding between the trees, ever seeking. And out in the depths of Crystal Lake, something awakened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place seven years after the end of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, and neither Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan nor Friday the 13th Part IX: Jason Goes to Hell have happened or will happen. Period. The Cthulhtist does NOT approve.
> 
> Much of Tina’s monologue/memory/nightmare is taken straight from The New Blood. It’s very important to me to ground this story within the frame built by the F13 series. I’ve been waiting for far too long for these two amazing characters to meet up again, so, impatient wee monster that The Cthulhtist is, it decided to just write how it imagines the confrontation happening would be.
> 
> Hope y’all enjoy reading this as much as I’m enjoying writing it.


	2. The Desecration of Graves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something wicked this way comes ...

Bound By Rusted Chains 

Chapter Two: The Desecration of Graves

Sudden awareness stabbed into and through Jason Voorhees’ long-submerged corpse, awful with the pressure of the water surrounding him and filling his dead lungs that screamed again for air. He struggled violently against the chains wrapped around him, barely even noticing the skeleton of a man bound to his body getting torn apart by his increasingly desperate, thrashing attempt to escape. He did not realise it, but the force that had returned him to the faint semblance of life he possessed did not stay long enough to snap the chains as they had last time he had been reanimated in the lake, but another seven years spent beneath the water proved enough for one of the links of the Jarvis boy’s 17-year-old chain finally to snap in submission to his rapidly returning strength. Once his head emerged from the water and his decayed lungs filled with air instead of water, rage suffused him, almost a comfort to the animate corpse in its familiarity.

_ Someone _ had dragged him out of the peace of his grave again. It was always someone, tainting the land with their unwelcome presence and forcing him to rise and walk and kill. The first time he had been ripped away from death was by the very boy who had sent him to the grave years before, grown up. The second time he had arisen had been due to the strange little fair-haired slip of a girl who had somehow turned everything surrounding them into weapons against him with a terrible power he could sense and feel but not comprehend. Whoever had forced him back into his body this time  _ would  _ die. Tommy Jarvis and Tina Shepard had stopped him from completing his mission of vengeful death in defence of the cursed land where he and his mother had died so terribly, escaping him with their lives intact if not their minds, but this defiler of his grave  _ would _ die, he silently promised his mother and the forces that had originally resurrected him and made him the guardian of this forest after he drowned. Then, after he finished cleansing the grounds of trespassers, he could devote himself for a time to tracking down Jarvis, Shepard, Higgins, Field, Garris, Holt -  _ anyone _ who had escaped his vengeance - just as he had hunted down his mother’s killer, Alice Hardy, before returning to Crystal Lake.

His mind little more than a crimson haze of justified murder, Jason stalked out of the lake, the water dripping onto the tall weeds around the shore from the rags still clinging to his earthly remains the only sound he made. Once ashore, he looked around and listened intently for any sign of the desecrator responsible for his return, but even though this had been a comparatively populated area of the lakeside when last he walked here, there was no sign of human life now. The homes and cottages appeared long vacant, the boarded up and shattered windows mocking him with their emptiness. There were no odours of cooking, perfume, or sweat to assail his flaring nostrils, no signs at all of any recent presence.

But that was impossible. In his experience, some degree of proximity was required for someone to drag him forth from his grave - Tommy had stood mere feet from his coffin the first time and Tina had been on the dock out over the water when he surfaced the second time. That meant whoever was responsible had to be close. But Jason was not worried; his patience matched his determination and conviction, so he knew he would be able to track them down. In a place so empty of life, they could not hide from him for long.

He stalked through the knee-high weeds, noting that no hint of the house where Tina had attempted to destroy him with fire remained, and thoughts of hunting strategies were beginning to flow through his mind as he approached the first seemingly vacant structure, determined to perform a building by building search for his elusive quarry if that were what his goal required of him. After all, he had time - it was  _ their  _ time that was rapidly coming to a violent and bloody end.

These more logical, orderly thoughts of hunting allowed his mind to clear somewhat of the bleeding fog within, and even as he broke down the door with a crash of rotting wood, stepped into the dark, leaf-strewn foyer and stalked from room to room, throwing aside any scraps of furniture in his way, he began to wonder.

He assumed that the area had been vacated in response to his presence, but how long had he been underwater this time? Why had someone returned to free him from death, to reawaken the curse he personified?

The house was clearly empty and his were probably the first feet to cross the threshold in years, so he moved onto the next abandoned cottage.

It, too, was undisturbed and long-empty, as was the next.

So where was the trespasser? Where was his first kill hiding from the doom they had summoned?

The next house was empty, as was the boathouse he rummaged through like a heaving hurricane of destruction, flinging the abandoned canoes, rowboats, and paddles aside as easily as if they were a child’s tinker toys to see if anyone hid beneath them. The cold blood pulsing through dead veins burned with his mounting rage.

_ Someone  _ had brought him back.  _ Someone  _ was here. They had to die. It was his duty to ensure they did not leave here alive. His mother’s death demanded it. The ground beneath his boots was hungry, and only the blood of the unwelcome would appease it.

What Jason saw in the fourth house he entered filled him with disgust and loathing. In the foyer, on the wall across from the door he had just ripped from its hinges, a cobweb-strewn, dusty old mirror in a carved wooden frame hung, and within that worm-eaten frame he saw his hated face reflected back at him upon the tarnished glass, his single whole, functioning eye widening in shock before quickly narrowing as the fury enveloped him. Rage and loathing consumed him as he put his fist through the glass and into the crumbling, plaster-covered lathe board wall behind.

How could he have forgotten that the girl had used that awful power she possessed to split the mask that hid his gruesome countenance in half? His steps guided by his anger, he began ransacking the house in search of both his next victim and something to hide the deformed face that had condemned him to his first death and the grim existence that followed.

His almost frantic search for something suitable to cover his face drove him, a dead-yet-living tornado tearing through every room, until he reached the very last. No bed frame remained in the single bedroom of the small house, though a dark-stained mattress still lay on the damp carpet that squelched beneath his boots. And haphazardly thrown onto that dank surface was a single pillow in a dingy case. Picking it up, he dumped the pillow from the case then eyed the fabric intently, going by a long-ago memory to rip a single hole in it with his jagged, black thumbnail. He held it up before his face for a moment then pulled it over his head, a strange sense almost like relief flowing through him. The stink of mildew from the once-white pillowcase filled his nose and mouth, but once he twisted it around to form it to his face as much as possible, lined up the hole so his good eye blazed out - pale green and feral - and tucked the open end beneath the remaining loop of chain around his neck, he decided it would be acceptable until he found something better.

By the time he exited the fourth house with the makeshift mask over his head to hide the grotesquely decayed, mottled ruins of flesh stretched over his deformed and battered skull, so like the very first he had donned, the sun was beginning to rise. Jason was glad to be able to spare the sun that sight as he relentlessly continued his search.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You’re walking in the wrong damned direction, big guy!


	3. The Simple Pleasures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tina tries to make the cottage liveable

Bound By Rusted Chains 

Chapter III - The Simple Pleasures 

Just under a mile away from where the dead man had walked out of the lake, albeit in the opposite direction from where his resolute stride had borne his decayed corpse, the prey he sought tossed uneasily within the confines of her sleeping bag beneath the onslaught of the dreams her guilt induced. Although the boarded-up windows allowed little light into the first floor of the cottage she had appropriated for what she hoped would be her last and  _ very  _ brief visit to Crystal Lake, Tina awakened at sunrise, her internal clock still set to the rigid schedule forced upon her during her five years as a prisoner in all but name of the researchers running the Institute. She shook her head to clear away the clinging shreds of her nightmares from her fractured mind and stretched in the sleeping bag with a quiet, long groan, her stiff muscles protesting. It felt like every muscle, every inch of her body was sore, and she felt the urge to linger in her makeshift bed. However, the work she knew she must do to make the long-abandoned structure remotely habitable beckoned, so she slithered regretfully from the warmth of her cocoon and clambered to her feet.

The early morning light that managed to creep in around the edges of the weathered boards covering the windows dimly illuminated the interior of the house, and what she saw revealed by the sun was no less disappointing than it had appeared by pallid lantern light the previous night. With a sigh, Tina pulled on her jeans, slid her feet into her shoes, and rolled her sleeves up past her elbows then padded over to the kitchen sink, readying herself to attack the task at hand. Fortunately, whoever had boarded up the place before abandoning it had neglected to cover up the small, narrow window over the sink, so she could see better than she expected. She turned on the faucet, holding her breath when nothing happened for the span of six heartbeats, but then the pipes hidden within the warped cabinet in which it sat groaned and howled, shaking so violently she worried they might tear themselves apart, and the faucet finally spat a thick, red-brown liquid down into the deep, dirty tub-sink below.

Tina recoiled as her stomach churned, threatening to empty itself onto the floor she planned to mop, and she shuddered, the foul liquid spewing forth in spurts and gobbets reminding her too much of the blood she had seen spilling from too many bodies. Something made her turn around, and she saw  _ him _ standing right behind her, the masked monster towering over her and looking exactly as he had seven years before, a long chain and rotted shreds of fabric dangling from the large, thick, muscular, and equally rotted body, a tiedown spike glinting with unconstrained malevolence in the large, almost skinless hand upraised and ready to plunge it down into her chest. Her heart seemed to stop dead in her chest and her throat spasmed, cutting off her scream, then the murdering fiend looming over her … 

… just vanished. 

She fell back, her hip hitting the edge of the sink as an almost silent sob escaped her, tears streaking down her face.

“No, no, no, no, no, no. It can’t be! Jason’s dead. We took care of him. He’s gone. He can’t be back,” she whispered in horror, praying it had just been a hallucination and not one of her visions.

It was hard to tell the difference, except that the visions came true. 

Always.

Shaken to her very core, she turned back to the sink, relieved to see the water running clear, rinsing the last of the rusty swirls that had looked too much like blood down the drain. She swiped at the tears clinging to her face and lashes then splashed her face with the clear, cold water and forced herself to smile at the window across the sink from her.

It was just a memory, not a vision of the future. Jason would not be back. She knew better now than to reach into the lake with her power seeking to bring back her long-dead father. The past and the dead should be left in peace where they belong.

Still trembling slightly, Tina went to the pantry to grab the mop, bleach, and bucket she had found there last night. After rinsing the bucket and leaving it in the sink to fill, she quickly rolled up her sleeping bag and put it and her pillow on the table she had moved into the living room to clear the kitchen floor so she could try to get the old linoleum clean. She hurried back into the kitchen and turned off the faucet before the bucket got too heavy for her to lift out of the sink then poured in some bleach.

Pursing her lips, she looked at the mop and bucket, trying to decide whether to clean the floor herself or try to manipulate the mop across the floor with her power. Her body was still sore from her three days of near-panicked driving in the two cramped vehicles she had taken (how had she become a thief, too, she wondered - her life had forced her to do so many things she thought immoral and that she would never do, not until circumstances forced her hand, forced her to act in manners contrary to her nature), which made the thought of mopping even so small a room mildly unpleasant, but she knew that she had to move around to get her muscles to loosen up a bit. She did not really want to do it that way, but she grabbed the mop handle with both hands, determined to get the floor on which she would be sleeping clean. If the motion made her stiff shoulders and back hurt worse, she could always switch to using her telekinesis instead. This was worth at least a try.

She began to hum to herself as she pushed dirty bleach water over the curling linoleum floor, beginning to take joy in the mundane chore. Everything had been done  _ for  _ her for so many years, down to having nurses and orderlies making her bed every morning and folding her panties before placing them in the small chest of drawers in the small room where they stored her. The painful knots bunching the muscles of her shoulders and spine slowly relaxed, relieving her of the tension they carried with each push and pull of the mop handle, and before long, the water in the bucket was thick and black.

Realising that the water was now dirtier than the floor she was trying to clean, she leaned the mop against the sink, carried the bucket to the front door, and reached out to the front door with only a minute fraction of the power contained within her to unlock and open it so she could toss the bucket’s contents off the wide porch and into the weeds. Once she returned inside, she remembered that she still had to sweep out the dirt and dust she had swept from the kitchen into the foyer, so she returned to the kitchen to trade the bucket for the broom.

Sweeping was definitely easier than mopping, she decided, so once she felt the entranceway was as clean as she could get it, she brought the broom outside to sweep the layers of dead leaves and dirt off the front porch. After she had stripped the weathered boards of the accumulation of years of neglect, Tina turned her attention to the gingerbread cornices and brackets, using the broom to clear away the dust and cobwebs though there was nothing she could do about the mildew or the peeling white paint it stained. She was so lost in the simple pleasure of the task that she did not pause to consider that this one cottage amongst the two dozen or so dotting this part of the lake shore having a clean front porch would stand out like a sore thumb, alerting any observant passers by to the recent presence of someone.

Once she felt the porch was as clean as she could possibly make it, she returned inside, leaving the front door open to let the fresh air and light inside and hopefully to let out some of the thick mustiness within the abandoned structure and returning to the kitchen to finish mopping before even considering trying to address the rest of the cottage.

The sun was high overhead by the time Tina carried out the fifth and last bucket of mop water, this one almost totally clear, and dumped it off the porch into the weeds. Her feet were practically dancing over the boards beneath them as she hummed, revelling in the simple domesticity and her newly reclaimed freedom that allowed for it. The work was not particularly onerous, but she felt elation at the sense of accomplishment that had been denied to her in all aspects of her life except with regards to her telekinetic power for the whole of her adult life. Because she blamed that power for so much sorrow, pain, and death, she had never even been able to feel any pride in the increasing control over it she developed.

Then she made the mistake of looking out through the trees in front of the house and the sunlight glimmering off the lake captured her gaze in a rusting iron trap, chilling her from within, sending a shiver up her spine despite the warmth of the day. Memories of everything she had seen around the lake flashed before her eyes, her father’s terror as the covered dock crashed down upon him and dragged him beneath the water, Russell’s face split down the middle by an awful red gash, her mother’s body left where she fell, even Melissa’s bloodied form with an axe embedded in her face flying across the room to crash into the television … she whirled around and fled back into the house, the untouched door slamming and locking itself behind her. Unthinking, she raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time, trying in desperation not to think of the monster falling backward onto the staircase from the landing after her power slammed a hanging light fixture into his face, the great weight of his tremendously, impossibly strong body crashing through the stairs upon which he landed, but the image was still as vividly imprinted upon her mind’s eye as when she watched it happen seven years before, the strange groan ripped from that ruined mouth as he fell, the only sound she was certain she had heard him make throughout the course of his relentless attacks, ringing in her ears.

Heart rattling against the steel bars of her imprisoning ribcage as if trying to free itself from her chest to flee all of the horror she had seen and survived when so many others had fallen, she collapsed to her knees in the narrow hallway, gasping for air. The three doors lining one wall violently slammed open and shut over and over in rhythm with her racing heartbeat, the abused hinges shrieking in protest against the unaccustomed fury of their movement while dust and splinters danced in the light shining through the rattling triangular window at the end of the hallway, and Tina shut her eyes tightly while covering her ears with her hands against the cacophonous chaos surrounding her until the window glass shattered within its frame, bursting inward as if struck by an axe, and it finally subsided.

She tentatively lowered her hands from her ears and opened her eyes in the sudden quiet then heaved a sigh. Kneeling on the bare wooden floor, surrounded by shattered glass and whirling motes of dust, she looked at the destruction surrounding her and had to bite back a sob. The door to the larger bedroom had flung itself from its hinges and embedded itself in the wall across from it and the bathroom door hung drunkenly off its single remaining hinge. Realising what her outburst had wrought, she crumpled under a wave of despair.

So much for control.

But it was this place that was getting to her, the pervasive, malign aura underlying the natural beauty of what should have been a peaceful area burrowing into her mind like maggots insatiable in their hunger for dead flesh.

Why had she ever come back here to this cursed land where the dead could walk? She really should not have returned.

But she had nowhere else to go - nowhere she could think of where she would not have been found already and dragged back to the Institute, that is.

“Maybe you belong here,” her guilt whispered in her ear with a sly little giggle.

Tina did not consider herself much a fighter by nature, but neither did she feel she was particularly prone to giving in to the insidious tentacles of despair that had seemed so entwined around the entire structure forming her life for the last fifteen years, and yet she could feel them constricting around her now, squeezing, probing for any opening, any weakness they could exploit to allow them to slither into the core of her heart, mind, and soul so they could suck out all of her hopes until they left her as a dried out husk, weak and too easily ground into dust by even the gentlest touch. In that moment, it would have been so easy to succumb. But there was  _ something  _ within her that resisted, a blue-burning fire the colour of her crystalline eyes that whispered through her that she  _ was _ a fighter, that she had freed herself from the Institute with no outside assistance, that she had stopped the unstoppable killing machine - the murdering horror that was all that remained of a little boy named Jason Voorhees who had drowned so very near to where she now knelt - and that she would get through this, too. Yes, she was being hunted, had heard the announcements over the radio describing her as a dangerous escaped mental patient who should not be approached but who should be reported to the authorities immediately if spotted, but those hunting her were just men, and men are fragile - they can be stopped. They can be broken. And though it raised bile high into her throat to gag her whenever she admitted it to herself, she  _ knew  _ just how easily and effectively she could break them.

If confronted, she  _ would  _ break them.

Arising from the floor, she brushed the dust from her hair and clothing, not feeling terribly confident but also not feeling like she hung from a single strand of spider silk above the open maw of ravenous despair anymore. Now that she had daylight to assist her and since she was already upstairs, she decided to check out the bedrooms again in more detail to see if anything worth salvaging remained within for her to find. Recalling the furry thing with its long, naked tail that she had glimpsed nesting in the comforter in the larger bedroom, she chose to enter the other first. Her nerves still felt too raw, her grasp upon control too tenuous to risk being startled just then.

The stench of mould was still present, emanating from the stained mattress lying crooked across its frame, but it did not seem quite so offensive when the sunlight streamed through the unshaded window and the bleach from attacking the kitchen floor with a mop still burned in her nostrils. The first thing this place needed was fresh air, she decided. She strode across the well-worn wooden floor, ghosts of dust swirling around her running shoes with each step, and glared at the window in its frame with the image of Dr. Crews, messily disemboweled as if the monster had taken some sort of tearing, ripping power tool to his gut, in mind. The window opened, letting in the September breeze, and Tina smiled. She was just glad she would not have to struggle with the gross mattress to get it down the stairs and out of the house. Her power could be terrible and terrifying even to her, but now that she had some control, it could also be useful. She still did not thank whatever force had imbued her with it - useful though it might be, it remained the source of nearly all of the pain and sorrow and loss that had characterised her life thus far. And she  _ definitely  _ did not thank the scientists at the Institute for teaching her that control.

Not wanting to be too close in case something was hiding within its dark recesses, she tentatively extended a small filament of power, nudging open the closet door. When she heard and saw no hint of movement from within, she approached, still cautious. A few derelict wire hangers dangled from a sagging rod, but otherwise it was empty. She tried not to feel too disappointed. Since there was nothing else in the room, she went to the bathroom, still hesitant to confront the thing she saw last night in the other bedroom just yet. In the bathroom, she was delighted to find two rolls of toilet paper still in their wrappers and several ratty old towels in the cabinet under the sink that were musty but which were not mildewed. She turned on the tub, this time not looking to see what horrors the pipes might belch forth, instead unfolding the towels and shaking them out one by one to distract her from the curiosity-driven urge to look.

Her curiosity had so rarely served her well in the past, yet it still plagued her. She had asked one therapist how to overcome it during her early days at the Institute, before she understood that their goals were not really to help her despite their assurances that her comfort and safety were their primary goals. He had dismissed her concerns, telling her it was a positive attribute, a sign of her intelligence that should be encouraged and fostered. Nobody ever said it where she could hear, but later on she came to believe that they had encouraged her curiosity just so that she would have more unpleasant experiences, more bad memories from which to draw focus to shape her telekinesis and force it to obey exactly.

How had she ever been so naïve, so trusting?

She figured that they were responsible for Nick not visiting her even when she was in the psychiatric ward at Carpenter Memorial, as well, once she learned that they had been watching her since receiving Dr. Crews’ last report from Crystal Lake. She wondered what they could have told him to keep him away - what could they possibly say that was worse than everything he saw her do to escape Jason, what was more awful than the hellish nightmare of blood, fire, agony, and death they had survived together? Nick had not seemed horrified or frightened by her at the time, had held her hand when the emergency room physician examined her twisted knee, had even visited her every day of her first week in the psych ward. But then one day he just stopped coming. No letter. No phone call. No explanation. Nothing. For years she had tortured herself, wondering if he had an accident of some sort, possibly skidding off the road into a tree while driving to visit her like she had when she had the dreadful vision of her mother’s death while trying to flee Dr. Crews and Crystal Lake and they had kept that information from her for whatever reason they might have constructed, something that either incapacitated or killed him. The first thing she had done with the stolen laptop after escaping the Institute was look him up online, dreading finding his obituary. Instead, she had found a three-year-old wedding announcement.

She had been so sure that he loved her and that they would reunite as soon as she found him again, that it would be a love story from the movies come to life - it was the dream that had sustained her through her imprisonment and all of the testing and training - and seeing him grinning so happily in grainy black and white from the screen with his arm around another girl, another slender, pretty blonde, had stabbed a tiedown spike into her, simultaneously through the gut and through her heart. She had lost him, too, no less surely than if she had not been able to save him from Jason’s viciously unrelenting attacks, though she tried not to let the bitter disappointment overwhelm her, trying to be glad he was not dead as she had feared, trying to be happy for him that he seemed to have moved on and found happiness for himself after all of the horror and loss. 

She was not particularly successful in that endeavour. 

The sound of the cabinet door and toilet seat vibrating in warning that she was losing control of her emotions again was finally enough to snap her out of her reverie, and she was relieved to see the water gushing clean and clear from the faucet into the tub when she turned around. She was not sure how much more her rattled nerves could handle today.

After she crammed the rubber stopper into the drain, she laid the towels in the tub to soak, running downstairs to grab her bottle of dollar store body wash from her bag and bounding back up the stairs so she could pour it in before the tub filled, hoping it would suffice as she had forgotten to buy laundry detergent. Since she had not actually gotten to do her own laundry even once in the last seven years, the need for it simply had not crossed her distracted mind that had been hovering upon the edge of outright panic almost every moment after her escape until she had found this cottage. She sat on the edge of the tub, stretching out her shoulders while waiting for it to fill, just enjoying the slightly artificial lavender scent of the body wash after spending most of the day so far with her sinuses full of dust, mildew, and bleach.

Once it was full and the faucet turned off, she took a deep breath, trying to prepare herself for what might await her in the other bedroom. Whatever she had seen there illuminated within the pallid circle of lantern-light cut through the gloom last night had appeared vaguely rat-like with its hideous, scaly tail but far too large to be a rat (she hoped rats could not grow so big!) - at least the size of a well-fed house cat if not larger. She stood, momentarily wishing she had a baseball bat in case it launched itself at her, then laughed aloud at how ridiculous that was. She did not need a bat to defend herself - if anything frightened or shocked her enough, her power would surge out to defend her without a conscious thought on her part. It would act for her, she had learned through experience, a reflex that lashed out more quickly than her mind could ever think and process what she perceived.

Fortified by that comforting reminder of how well she could defend herself, she entered the second bedroom and looked around - she had survived a series of increasingly vicious attacks by the legendary Camp Blood Killer with little more than a twisted knee and the ghastly images indelibly cut into her mind’s eye like scars to show for it, had she not, so what danger could the thing on the bedspread possibly pose to her? Sunlight from the two large windows flooded the room, and the first thing she did was force them open. One opened easily, requiring little more force than the telekinetic version of a nudge, but the other was frozen within its frame and when she finally concentrated hard enough to force it up, a whole section of the frame splintered then crumbled, revealing that the sill was rotted through. Despite that, the early afternoon breeze blowing into the musty room smelled and felt wonderful. 

She did not know whether to be relieved or more uncomfortable that she saw nothing on the dark blue bedspread - she did not think she had hallucinated the ugly creature on the bed when exploring the cottage the prior evening, although she grudgingly accepted that was a possibility - and if it was not there now, then where was it hiding?

She sent out another mere tendril of her power to open the cracked closet door all the way, and she caught a hint of movement from the shadows within. To her absolute disgust, the biggest opossum she had ever seen scurried out, and she squealed in revulsion when it paused to hiss at her as it passed by her in its scuttling dash to hide itself under the bed.

“Ew, gross, gross, gross,” she muttered as she headed toward the empty doorway, intending to go back downstairs to fetch the broom so she could herd it out.

But that was hardly necessary.

“Tina, you dummy,” she pronounced with a sigh upon realising how much easier it would be to just use her power to manoeuvre the opossum down the stairs and out the door, almost certain she could do so without hurting the ugly creature.

She stepped out of the path the opossum would have to take to get from the bed to the doorway, then focused upon the memory of her first full hallucination of Jason, when the monster she had unwittingly pulled from the lake killed Michael before she ever had a chance to meet the birthday boy, while she tried reaching for the opossum with her mind, attempting to guide it toward the open doorway and down the hall to the stairs. It fled, moving faster than she expected its short legs could run, hissing and snarling the whole time. She had to run after it to make sure that she kept it moving toward the front door, and to get the door open before it felt trapped between her telekinesis and the solid old wood. She felt bad to see the opossum so obviously terrified, although there was a tiny part of her that she tried to ignore telling her that it deserved to be afraid after scaring the bejesus out of her the night before. That part of her, the one that spoke of justice, no matter how harsh as long as it was fitting, and of vengeance frightened her, and every time it raised its head to remind her of its existence, she tried to squash it down. She was outright terrified of what her power might do to someone if it obeyed that part of her subconscious mind.

Fortunately for the opossum and her conscience, she managed to get the door unlocked and opened in time for it to scuttle outside, across the porch, down the stairs, and finally into the woods beyond. She watched it until she could see no trace of its thick, pale tail through the underbrush. With a sigh, she closed and locked the front door then turned and headed back upstairs to further explore the contents of the second bedroom, wondering how she could feel tired already even though it was still early in the afternoon and again regretting not having taken the nurse’s watch along with everything else.

Even though she expected nothing else, Tina still felt the sting of disappointment when she found nothing in the second bedroom’s closet except several more bent wire hangers and what she assumed was opossum scat. At least she hoped it was opossum scat - she did not want to encounter any more wildlife in the cottage. Without touching it, she flung the scat out the window. The two mattresses had to go, too, but she really did not feel like dealing with them just yet, telekinetic power or not.

Having finished exploring the rest of the house, she knew she should address the living room with its dank carpet and mouldering sofa, but before she could tackle that, she knew she needed to eat something. It was important that she keep her strength up for when she figured out where to go from Crystal Lake, just in case the Institute managed to track her down. She would need to keep her wits about her should it come to a standoff, which meant she would need to sleep and eat well - neither of which were strengths of hers, especially when she was stressed, and she could not recall having felt more stressed than she was now since her last trip here with Dr. Crews except perhaps in the period after her father’s death.

At that thought, the pernicious voice of her guilt seemed to whisper to her, “after you killed your father.”

“Oh, shut up,” she replied aloud to it, even though she knew it was only her own conscience berating her yet again.

She grabbed a bottle of water then dug a granola bar and some peanut butter crackers from her bag of groceries, knowing it was not much of a lunch, but even though she had skipped breakfast she just did not feel hungry. Even so, she sat down cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the clean, faintly bleach-scented kitchen and forced herself to eat every bite, though she found that the peanut butter crackers were already stale - which was just her luck, she figured. It did not take her long to finish her small meal, then it was time to return to the living room.

Gritting her teeth, she picked up the lantern so she would be able to see despite the boards that covered all of the windows and left the room in a dim twilight despite the sun shining so brightly outside, then she put on her bravest face, trying to tell herself that it could not possibly be as bad as dealing with the opossum, and stepped onto the carpet that felt oddly spongy beneath her shoes. The stink of mould wafted up with each step, a phantom that teased her flaring nostrils and caused her to miss the caustic tingle of bleach. By the time she reached the middle of the room, she had decided that she would try to tear out the carpet, and when she turned around and saw the stacked-stone fireplace she resolved to do so first thing tomorrow. It did not really matter to her what sort of flooring might lie beneath it - whatever it was, it was bound to be better than that mould-infused, 40-plus-year-old shag. However, without that and the unsalvageable couch, it would be a very nice room - she could picture herself relaxing in front of the fireplace, enjoying the warmth and the quiet sounds of the night insects singing to each other in the evening before falling asleep. For a moment, she considered breaking into some of the other abandoned homes to see if she could find some decent furniture, but then she remembered that she had no intentions of staying at the lake any longer than absolutely necessary, so there was no need to furnish the place.

As the room was empty except for the sofa and the breakfast nook type table and chairs she had moved there to give herself more room on the kitchen floor to sleep, she focused on the fireplace. The former owners had left their fireplace tools behind, and though they were cheap and quite banged up, in Tina’s inexpert opinion they were at least serviceable. When she opened the damper, though, a cloud of black dust exploded into the room, sending her reeling back into the foyer, coughing and fanning her burning eyes, afraid to rub them in case any particles of soot had gotten into them. As soon as she caught her breath, she hurried to the sink to rinse her eyes out and wash her hands and face.

Then, a heartbeat’s span after she turned off the faucet, she heard the dry crack of a twig breaking as if beneath a foot from just outside the cottage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m not sure how or why this chapter became so ridiculously long, but the details are important.
> 
> Also, do sticks/twigs crack beneath opossum feet? 0;-D


	4. Waking Nightmares

Bound By Rusted Chains

Chapter IV: Waking Nightmares

At the same time when Tina was sweeping the front porch of the cottage she had appropriated clear of the layers of dirt, rotting dry leaves, cobwebs, and the fragile husks of dead insects, all the evidence of several years of neglect, the neither truly living nor truly dead murderer she had inadvertently and  _ entirely  _ unintentionally freed from the underwater chains in which she had caused him to be imprisoned for the past seven years was actually reaching the edge of his ordinarily near-limitless patience. He had thoroughly yet quickly inspected every single structure he passed like a storm of pure chaos in his relentless search for the interloper who had resurrected him, from the once-grand vacation homes of Crystal Lake’s wealthiest visitors decaying elegantly as dowager empresses beside the lake to the tiny sheds and outhouses by decrepit cabins hidden in the overgrown forest that had not been significantly lovelier or more solid before the residents had abandoned them, his passage destructive as a category 5 hurricane in his haste to hunt down his prey. The rage only mounted within his rotted yet inhumanly strong body with each structure he found empty until he felt it might erupt forth from him as flames. 

He might even have considered setting each building and outbuilding he found afire to flush out his quarry from wherever they were hiding, but the underbrush growing thick and wild around the abandoned structures was far too dry to take such a risk that would be likely to start a conflagration that could level most of the forest covering so much of Wessex County. And fire was not one of the tools the Camp Blood Killer preferred to use - it was too uncontrollable, too unpredictable, and control was immensely important to him. It was why he used the corpses of his kills to terrify his victims and drive them in the direction that best served his deadly purpose and away from those objects and places that might assist them in escaping his wrath - nailing bodies over exits, placing severed heads upon the driver’s seats of vehicles, rigging corpses to swing down toward fleeing victims to encourage them to turn back - the uses to which he could put the dead to exert control over the soon-to-be dead were endless. That desire for control was much of why, even as a child before he drowned, he had excelled at darts, archery, knife throwing, and other physical activities that require precision, patience, and control. Because of her fears about how unutterably cruel children could be to anyone who they perceive as different or strange, much less obviously deformed as young Jason was, Pamela Voorhees had never enrolled her megalocephalic son with his twisted features in school, so activities that he could practice in the backyard of the small home they shared, all by himself while his mother was away at work, were practically the only distractions the isolated little boy had from the loneliness and monotony of his existence when his mother was away.

The child who the relentless killer once had been never would have imagined how he would come to use those skills he had developed as a lonely child whose disfigured face denied him the companionship of other children, not that anyone could have predicted the strange, terrible fate awaiting that solitary, friendless little boy after he died on his 11th birthday.

As Jason strode furiously from the detached garage beside the latest small cabin that was mocking his continuing failure to capture his prey with its gaping, roofless emptiness, his chest heaving with each enraged breath and his almost skeletonised yet strong and fully capable hands clenched into fists, he glanced up at the sky and judged by the sun’s position within the firmament that he had wasted enough time searching in this direction. It was time to return to the weed and debris-strewn site where the Shepard home once stood beside the lake to continue his search in the other direction.

His single eye glinted and his ruin of a mouth twitched into what was meant to be smile behind the soft, mildew-infused old pillowcase from which he had fashioned his new mask when he spotted an axe someone had left behind, embedded in the top log of the woodpile beside the garage. He wrenched it out with ease, his long fingers curling comfortably around the throat, then he slammed it down into the top log on the pile, splitting it and the log beneath with a single, powerful blow, satisfied by the sensation of the impact vibrating up his arm. Though its former owner had not kept it as sharp as he might have liked, it would suffice. It felt good,  _ right _ to hold such a weapon again.

Having found both a temporarily acceptable replacement for the mask the dreadful little blonde girl had somehow split down the middle without touching it and a satisfactory weapon to use upon the object of his search, he felt his confidence return for the first time in hours,  _ knowing _ again with almost perfect certainty that the hunt would end soon and the newest desecrator of his grave would lie dead at his feet, as it should be. Their blood sinking into the earth would satisfy the cursed land’s ravenous hunger for vengeance, at least temporarily, and once his current task was accomplished, he could devote himself to hunting down the very few trespassers who had come to Crystal Lake and escaped his justice with their lives intact. And he  _ would  _ find them. Death stalked the Earth again in the decayed form of Jason Voorhees’ living yet unkillable corpse, and those very few who had, by their mere presence here, violated the sanctity of this unhallowed ground but who for too long had escaped the punishment they had earned by their folly, who had lived for far  _ too  _ long, would finally pay for their desecration with their blood and their lives.

Though he never broke into a run, just walking with a long, purposeful stride, it took him very little time to cover the distance back to the spot from which he had strode out of the lake, and he paused in the empty, weed-infested lot where the house little blonde Tina had blown up in her desperate attempt to destroy him had stood. He knew that he needed to hunt down all of the others who had escaped, that he was  _ compelled  _ to track and kill them, but even though all of them had hurt him and Tommy Jarvis had even managed to kill him for a time before violating his grave just as he had violated the peace of the land where Jason and his mother had been killed, it was not personal. Killing them was just his duty. But the Shepard girl … she was something else entirely. He looked forward to ending her life. She, that slender slip of a girl, had come the closest of anyone and anything that he had encountered since he arose after drowning as a child to frightening him. He could not understand how she could have inflicted so much damage upon his body, how she had managed to stop him without actually touching anything, or what the invisible power that had turned everything against him and restrained him bodily which seemed to have emanated from her slender, delicate-appearing little body could have been. She had confused him and very nearly frightened him, and he  _ hated  _ her for that. He had never felt the slightest inclination to do anything to his victims except to kill them, not even Alice Hardy who had murdered his beloved mother, but he wanted to make Tina Shepard suffer.

He  _ would  _ make her suffer.

Once he finished dealing with his current quarry, wherever they were hiding.

There was no reason for him to believe it, but he  _ felt  _ that whoever had resurrected him again had stood upon that very spot before doing whatever they had done to bring him back. Jason did not know how it was done, but neither did he care. The metaphysics involved in the perpetuation of his undead state meant nothing to him. He simply  _ was _ . All that mattered to him was that he was back, and his duty to the cursed land beckoned.

However, because of his inexplicable sense that his quarry had been here so recently, he decided to inspect the overgrown lot more carefully than he had when he first waded ashore. It did not take him long to to detect the evidence he sought, the vestiges of a recent presence other than his - a few blades of grass bent, crushed beneath feet much smaller than his, the faint impression of a pair of similarly small shoes left in the mud at the very edge of the lake, signs that someone else had walked here a short time before. Anticipation pumped adrenaline through his veins as he followed the slight traces the trespasser had left behind to the long-unmaintained dirt road. Had it rained recently, he knew that he would not have missed the tyre tracks leading in the opposite direction from which he had begun his hunt, but even though the brown tips of the limp grass and dust swirling across the road told him that it had not rained in quite some time, there were a few visible traces of the recent passage of a vehicle that he could follow.

Stalking through the thick underbrush and trees between the road and the houses so that he could simultaneously keep the faint impressions of the tyre tracks left in the hard-packed, dry dirt in sight, he cursorily examined the structures he passed for the slightest hints that the person he sought might have hidden themselves away there. But there were no signs of disturbance in the underbrush that caught on the tears in his ragged pants and brushed against the strange, decayed flesh of his calves beneath, and there were no indications of human occupation in any of the structures by which he passed.

Again, he found himself wondering how much time had passed while he was trapped beneath the water where he had drowned so many years before. From the condition of the houses and other structures he had explored, most of which had been occupied and well-maintained when he was dragged to the bottom of Crystal Lake in chains again, he judged that several years had passed, possibly decades.

Was it possible that so much time had passed him by that those he meant to hunt could have lived full lives, their trespasses unavenged, and died peacefully, far away from this ground that howled for their blood? The thought stopped him where he stood, chilling the blood pumping through his dead veins. Although, he realised, if they were already dead and almost nobody visited this place he haunted, that would make fulfilling his duties to his mother and the land much simpler.

His pause could not have been better timed. Only a few feet up ahead, it appeared that the tyre tracks might have turned off the road onto a narrow, rutted driveway. Smiling beneath the old pillowcase he wore as a mask, his hand tightened around the axe’s throat as he silently followed the tracks along the remains of the driveway to the detached garage. He thought he caught a whiff of burnt oil, exhaust, and gasoline through the thick stink of mildew that had suffused his nostrils ever since he donned the pillowcase to hide the horror of his face, and gritted his teeth. Even though he could not see anything clearly through the layers of grime coating the garage windows, he could make out the shadowy outline of the source of the odours his nose was picking up.

The recently-driven car was still parked in there.

That implied that whoever had driven it was still here.

And given how many years appeared to have passed since anyone had regularly visited this section of Crystal Lake, it was likely that his quarry was holed up nearby.

Jason turned away from the garage and stalked around the cottage associated with it, noting the warped boards covering the downstairs windows, but after seeing the dank and decrepit condition of most of the mouldering buildings around the lake, he felt almost certain that this was where the person who had resurrected him would be hiding. The sagging roof was free of holes and only one small, triangular window on the second floor was broken, so the structure likely remained sound. When he reached the front of the cottage, he nearly laughed in triumph. The fool clearly knew little about stealth and hiding - whatever could have possessed them to sweep the accumulated leaves and all other signs of abandonment from the front porch, and was that  _ bleach _ he smelled from the wet weeds below? They might as well have put up a sign.

Right before mounting the front steps, he intentionally stepped upon a dry branch, wanting his victim to know their death had arrived.

************

Dread filled Tina, her overflowing terror dripping as icy sweat that flowed down the line of her spine and between her breasts at the crack of dry wood right outside of her sanctuary. Wildly looking around the kitchen for anything she could use to defend herself, she wondered in abject horror how the Institute could have tracked her down so quickly. Even  _ she  _ had not considered that she might choose to hide out at Crystal Lake over the weeks she spent planning her escape. Furthermore, had she known that this would be her destination, she probably would not have tried to break out of the facility at all. She had nothing but horrible memories of this place - all of the pain, suffering, loss, death, and blood … so much blood … her mind recoiled at the mere thought of it, and when the researchers had suggested a year ago that they should bring her back to Crystal Lake to see how her new degree of control over her psychokinetic power would be if she were to return to the site of all of her guilt, pain, and the worst of her bad memories, she had refused to eat anything for a whole week until they grudgingly dropped the subject.

Trying to remember the locations of every single object she had found during her exploration and unfinished cleaning of the cottage, she slipped behind the half-closed kitchen door upon discovering that she would not be visible from there through the small window over the sink and she could see the front - and only exterior - door clearly through the gap between the hinges. Shivering from the fear mingled with anticipation, holding her breath, she strained her ears to hear the sound of their boots upon the creaking old wood of the porch that would alert her to their approach.

Having heard nothing from outside since the gunshot-snap of the twig, she could not stop herself from gasping when the front door exploded open in an eruption of shards and splinters. But when the air cleared and she saw what stood there, framed in the light streaming through the shattered doorway, chest heaving as with exertion, the ability to breathe abandoned her entirely.

She could feel every hair on her frozen body stand on end as a familiar mantra played within her, the refrain “oh no, please be another hallucination! Please be another hallucination!” running through her mind on repeat.

Even though his face was hidden beneath a dirty pillowcase tucked into the rusty chain encircling his neck rather than the battered old hockey mask he had worn over the terrifying ruin of his face and which she had broken in half seven years before, there was no mistaking the figure that haunted her worst nightmares standing there, axe in hand, the decayed yet still horribly solid body clothed in tattered rags that barely hid the lengths of gleaming white bone exposed where skin and muscle had rotted away, and the single, pale green eye glaring from a hole torn in the pillowcase were all unmistakable, unforgettable, terrible. Tina wanted to close her eyes, hoping that it was just another hallucination or that she was dreaming … anything at all other than the reality that Jason Voorhees was back, that he was standing in the doorway of the house she had hoped would be sanctuary where she could hide from those who hunted her, his inhumanly strong form radiating such intense, hot fury that she thought the air around him should be shimmering with the heat of that terrible rage which might ignite the air around him with flames. But she could not close her eyes. She could not breathe, could not move. All she could do was stare in horror through the gap between the kitchen door and its frame, all that stood between her and the monster who had killed her mother and so many others, who had come so close to killing her. After a moment, she slowly raised a shaking hand to cover her mouth, to muffle the scream she felt bubbling up, fearing she might not be able to hold it inside.

The monster was still there. Her heart sank and the hollow dread sitting coiled in her belly like a pit unfurled and spread itself wide to gnaw upon her composure - her hallucinations never lasted this long. This nightmare was real.

_ He _ was real.

The kitchen cabinets began to rattle on their hinges.

**********

After bursting through the door, Jason paused to look around. A staircase stood before him, to his right stood an open doorway leading into a dark, carpeted room, and to his left was a doorway leading to what appeared to be the kitchen. His prey was in this house, somewhere, hiding. He could feel it. He stood perfectly still and silent, a macabre statue, listening for any sign of his quarry - a muffled footstep, the slide of a door surreptitiously being closed, breathing, a heartbeat.

The silence was shattered by a rattling sound, wood against wood. He turned slowly toward the kitchen, the source of the staccato noise, and caught a glimpse of a sliver of pale skin and a crystalline blue eye, wide with shock and blooming horror, through the crack between the half-open door and its frame. The eye met his, and he could see it go so wide the white was visible around the iris. He smiled beneath his mask.

He had found them. Found  _ her _ . That eye definitely belonged to a girl.

He took one long stride toward the kitchen where his prey was hiding, then another. He could see the cabinet doors that were vibrating restlessly upon their hinges, untouched by any hand, then they began to bang increasingly violently, and he hesitated.

This felt familiar - and not in the good way, like the feeling of a weapon in his hand or when a fleeing victim he was chasing tripped over something and fell heavily to the ground, sprawling, then wasted the last few seconds of their life crawling away from him, as if that could save them from death.

A knot clenched in his dead gut, and he narrowed his eye suspiciously, glaring at what little he could see of his prey through the crack.

The frightened blue eye, the smooth pale skin, the wispy fair hair … so familiar, 

but it seemed impossible. 

Why would  _ she  _ be here?

Why would  _ she _ have brought  _ him  _ back again?

And why did she look so shocked, when she was the one who had resurrected him yet again?

He could feel a silent growl rumbling in his chest. Hatred welled up within him. Rage. And something else - something that was not fear but was related thereto, a distant cousin of fear that brought with it vivid memories of what it was to try to kill little blonde Tina Shepard.

Ignoring the loud banging of the cabinet doors, he took another step forward.

*********

She saw the killer turn toward the kitchen and she tried to pray, but she could not remember any of the words to a single prayer. The only thing that came to mind when she frantically tried to dredge up  _ something  _ was “I’m a little teapot, short and stout; here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, then I shout, ‘Tip me over! Pour me out!’” She bit down on her lips behind her hand, hard, trying to hold back the hysterical laughter threatening to burst out of her at the inanity of it. Maybe she really was as crazy as Melissa, coldly beautiful Melissa,  **dead** Melissa with an axe through her face, so like the one she saw now in his horrible, almost skinless hand, who had been tossed carelessly into the corner like a broken doll, had claimed.

Then, he saw her. She knew it. She  _ felt  _ it. A sensation almost like static electricity skimmed over her sweat-slicked flesh, and Tina could feel every hair upon her body stand up at attention again. She wanted to pull back, every single nerve and muscle fibre in her body screaming for her to run away, to hide, but she was rooted to the spot, a spreading oak tree watching a tornado bearing down upon it, aware of the deadly storm approaching but unable to do anything to get out of its way except to prepare itself for imminent destruction.

Her gaze met his, brilliant topaz blue to pale, wildcat green, and a shiver ran through her at the malevolence gleaming in his eye, the  _ hatred _ she saw there as the cabinet doors and the empty light fixtures in the kitchen ceiling mirrored her shuddering. 

He took one step forward, then another. She could barely even think over the clattering din surrounding her.

She could not stay there, though, cowering behind the door like a child who just realised that the boogeyman is real and he knows right where she is. She had to face him. Taking a deep breath, she braced herself and stepped out from behind the door.

**********

Jason was shocked to see the girl walk out from her hiding place behind the door as if stepping forth from a memory, having half expected to have to fight off a barrage of half the items in the house before she would dare reveal herself. He gritted his teeth at the unpleasant confirmation that he was right - it definitely was the Shepard girl, and the sight of her brought back all of the confusion, all of the frustration and rage he had experienced the first time he encountered her, a harmless-looking little girl who could move objects with her mind. She had surprised him then, but now he knew what she was, what she could do. But even though he knew what she was capable of doing so she had lost the element of surprise, he doubted it would be easy to kill her. She could not kill him, though, he knew with reasonable certainty. He doubted that anyone could actually kill him now as Tommy Jarvis had done once years before. But she had been able to stop him once.

He paused for a heartbeat’s span in his approach to examine her, analysing the threat she posed. She looked older, though not by much, probably something less than a decade, so he knew that he had not been trapped beneath the water of Crystal Lake as long as he thought he might have been. She appeared thinner, paler, with dark smudges around her eyes as if she had not slept well in a long time. Her fine, flyaway blonde hair was longer now, too, hanging down to halfway between her shoulders and her elbows, the pale gold standing out starkly against the rolled-up sleeves of her loose, faded black T-shirt. Faint, shallow lines bracketed her unsmiling mouth. He could see her tension in the rigidity of her shoulders and the corded tendons of the neck he looked forward to breaking. But her topaz blue eyes remained the same, blazing as she stared at him with a hatred that matched his.

“Jason,” she breathed, his name hanging like mist in the emptiness between them.

Axe raised for a killing blow, he lunged through the doorway at her, aiming for the spot between her eyes.

He could feel the air around him change, charged and electric from the surge of energy emanating from her, right before the axe was wrenched from his hand with immense force that sent it flying end over end to embed itself with a loud crack of split wood in the pantry door.

In less than a heartbeat, he recovered from the shock. He did not need a weapon to kill. He lunged again, this time for her slender throat, but just as he felt his fingertips graze the soft, warm skin, damp with sweat, a tremendous force slammed into his chest, lifting him off his feet and flinging him back through the doorway, past the staircase, and through the doorway into the other room, slamming his back against the far wall with a loud, reverberating thud that seemed to shake the whole house.

Or was it her power that shook it?

The instant the force that had flung him bodily into the far wall dissipated, Jason pushed himself off the wall in absolute fury, looking around the dark, carpeted living room for something he could use to kill the girl. She clearly did not intend to die easily, and there was a part of him that worried that she might have become more powerful than the first time she raised him from the bottom of the lake. Even though she had not been able to kill him before, she had been able to stop him, trapping him beneath the very waters in which he had drowned as a child for years. She posed a true threat to him. 

So he had to kill her. Quickly.

But how?

The set of tools beside the large stone fireplace caught his eye. That might work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and criticism are most welcome!


	5. Escapee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three days earlier and several states away ...

Bound by Rusted Chains 

  
Chapter V - Escapee

_ 3 Days Earlier and Several States Away ... _

Jay Abernathy, the Director of the quasi-governmental autonomous agency officially titled the Central Facility for Nonphysical Cognitive Impetus Research Bureau Compilation Depot but simply called the Institute by the few people who were aware of its existence, feared that if one more thing went wrong his blood pressure would surge so high he would suffer a stroke. He could already feel the beginnings of a migraine coming on as he massaged his throbbing temples with blunt yet meticulously maintained fingertips. The nurses, orderlies, and guards had one overarching duty that should have been simple to perform: to keep one shy, passive 24-year-old woman who weighed all of 110 pounds soaking wet safe, secured, and medicated. In the five years she had spent under the care of the Institute, the Shepard girl had never even asked to leave the barbed wire and electric fence-enclosed grounds of the facility in remote central Nebraska or refused to take her twice-daily regimen of medications. Despite the psychokinetic power she possessed, the extent of which frankly terrified him, she had been the easiest and most tractable subject he had encountered in his 36 years working his way up through the Institute’s hierarchical bureaucracy.

Right up until she broke out of the facility last night.

He stalked down the long, bare hallway leading to the room in which they had housed the frighteningly, formidably powerful yet all too fragile and human Tina Shepard for the past five years, flashlight in hand, taking note of the extent of the destruction she left in the wake of her escape, disgusted that it had been allowed to happen. He had stepped over the solid steel door behind him that was bent in half, ripped off the thick, supposedly unbreakable hinges that ran its entire length, and every single one of the fluorescent bulbs lining the ceiling had exploded within their fixtures. Glass crunched beneath his carefully polished, sensible brown dress shoes with each step. As did bullet casings. The walls and ceiling were pockmarked with bullet holes, and the whole scene reminded him of something from a war movie set in some bombed-out city where running gun battles were a commonplace daily occurrence. It seemed impossible that Tina had been able to walk through the hailstorm of hot lead projectiles and broken glass completely unscathed, but the survivors all insisted that none of the blood splashing the unadorned grey concrete walls was hers. Up ahead at the end of the hallway, outside of the room that had been hers, the beam of his flashlight danced over another solid steel door that leaned against the cracked cement of the wall opposite the gaping, empty doorway beside a crumpled twin mattress and the shattered remains of the bed frame that littered the floor.

It was one thing to read the reports and watch her perform in controlled tests; it was something else entirely to see what she was capable of when she actually let loose with a goal in mind.

When he reached the room where they had kept her after carefully clambering over the broken bed frame, he was not exactly surprised to find it looked as if a massive tornado had ripped through it, though the degree of destruction was alarming. The two white-painted dressers were nowhere to be found, the shards of wood deeply embedded in the solid cement walls and shreds of fabric littering the chaos the only evidence that they had ever existed.

How could she have managed it? He had already spoken to all of the nurses who oversaw the administration of her medications except for the one on duty the previous evening when she made her escape who was still on the hospital floor, unconscious with a severe concussion and internal bleeding, and they all insisted that they had seen her take the cocktail of drugs meant to prevent an incident of this sort from happening. Obviously, they had not been paying close enough attention and she had managed to trick them.

Hell, she had tricked him, too. Pretty, quiet Tina with those big, innocent blue eyes and guileless smile - it was difficult to imagine her trying to deceive anyone. But she must have been planning this for some time, as according to the researchers’ estimations it should take at  _ least _ two to three days without her medications for her psychokinesis to manifest sufficiently, for her to be able to control and utilise it to the extent demonstrated by the destruction she had wrought. And that meant she had been able to lie with a smile to everyone she had encountered for close to a week.

That thought was almost more terrifying than the havoc she could wreak. She was far more dangerous than even he had imagined, and now she was out there,  _ somewhere _ , free, unmonitored and unmedicated. How many innocent people might be hurt before she could be found and contained … or destroyed?

The radio at his hip crackled to life.

“Abernathy? Medical. Miller’s awake and ready to talk.”

He did not smile even though he was pleased. Miller was the nurse charged with administering her medications last night, making him the last person to interact with Tina before she made her escape. Hopefully, he would have more to say than the armed guards who had failed to stop her.

There was nothing more to learn from the chaos left behind in her room and the hallway, anyway. He had seen what she could do. Now, he knew just how unpredictable and dangerous the pretty little blonde really was beneath her shy exterior.

“Roger that, Medical. On my way.”

**********

Larry Miller awakened in a strange room with the worst headache he could possibly imagine and a deep, pulsing ache that suffused his entire body. Just moving his eyes in his skull  **hurt** . With a capital H. The light hurt. Breathing hurt.  _ Everything _ hurt. His arm came into focus, or at least he thought it was his arm … wrapped in thick, white bandages through which several lengths of gleaming steel protruded ominously, one IV in the bend of his elbow and another in the back of his hand. He tried to clench his hand into a fist, but a blinding flash of crimson pain shot up his arm into his shoulder, wrenching a rough groan from his throat. He had to close his eyes against the dizzying wave of nausea it brought with it. The soft slapping of rubber soles upon tile brought him a new agony all its own. Then a bright, feminine voice tore into the wads of cotton filling his head.

“Mr. Miller? Larry? Good, you’re awake! I’ll need you to open your eyes a little wider … perfect!”

He groaned, wincing at the thin beam of light aimed first into one eye then the other.

“Larry? It’s Sandy, from Medical. Do you think you can talk?”

He tried to nod at the brunette nurse, finally recognising her through the nauseatingly swirling pain that blurred his vision, then nearly gagged upon the sudden, agonising clenching somewhere deep inside his chest cavity, filling his throat with bile.

“Yeah,” he croaked, his voice a deep, hoarsely ragged thing that sounded nothing like his familiar, smooth tenor.

He felt something slick and plastic slide between his lips, and upon testing the tubular object with his tongue, he recognised it to be a straw. He sucked on it with relish, drinking greedily.

Sandy’s warm voice again, that faint lilt of a sub-Mason Dixon accent comforting in its familiarity. “Slowly, hon, you don’t want to make yourself sick.”

He grunted in reply, reluctantly sipping a little bit slower, wondering why the fuck he was all wrapped in bandages and in Medical.

And then it all came rushing back to him. Bringing Tina her evening meds. Her smile when he handed her the two cups, one full of pills and the other full of water. The weird sensation of a breeze in the still, solid, underground room where no breeze could blow. Tina whispering “I’m so sorry, Mr. Miller.” Then his nostrils had filled with ozone, the faint smell of lightning,  _ everything  _ started to move, and he felt a bolt of white-hot pain sizzle through his right arm even as his right leg crumpled beneath him, dropping him heavily to the floor. He thought he might have screamed. The last thing he remembered thinking was “That’s impossible! Beds can’t fly!” And then everything went black.

He shivered. How long had he been out? What the  _ fuck  _ happened down in Tina’s room?

Sandy’s gentle voice broke through his thoughts again. “Do you remember what happened last night?”

Last night? Well hell, he must have been out for several hours, but at least it hadn’t been days or weeks. 

“Kinda,” he muttered through teeth gritted with pain - the longer he was awake, the worse he felt - and he had felt fucking terrible the instant he woke up or came to, whichever it had been.

“Think you’d be able to answer Mr. Abernathy’s questions?”

Oh  _ fuck _ ! If Abernathy was willing to come down from his high tower to talk to  _ him _ , it must be real bad.  _ Fuck, fuck,  _ **_fuck_ ** _. _

Dread forming a hard knot in his hollow, aching belly, he grunted, “Yeah.”

Miller heard Sandy mumble something into her radio and the crackle of a reply, but he was too distracted by pain and worry to pay attention to what was said.

“How bad am I hurt, Sandy? Be honest.”

Something dark flashed across the brunette nurse’s face and her smile faded, then she replied.

***********

Miller was an absolute mess, and knowing that the pretty, gentle little blonde they had been studying for the past five years was capable of doing  _ that  _ to a person who had done nothing but take care of her for most of that time … it was positively chilling. Abernathy stood at the foot of the hospital bed, staring. Metal rods jutted out of the plaster cast encasing the entire length of the nurse’s shattered right leg where it hung in traction, fixing the bones in place. Similar though more delicate steel structures for external fixation encircled his thickly bandaged right arm, forming a series of silvery halos that gleamed in the sterile fluorescent light, and his torso was wrapped like a gauze mummy with three thick, clear tubes to drain the blood and other fluids from his abdomen. Beneath the bandages covering Miller’s head above his eyebrows, Abernathy knew that a long line of staples delineated where his scalp had to be reattached to his skull.

Tina had very nearly scalped the nurse, probably with a shard of the mirror over her sink but possibly with a piece of glass from one of the light fixtures. Unless she could have done it with her mind alone ...

Abernathy stepped up to Miller’s bedside, dispassionately gazing down at the injured man.

“Nurse Miller,” the suit-clad man addressed the bandaged and broken figure upon the bed. “Do you remember what happened last night?”

Miller noticed that the Director failed to ask how he felt. Even after four years working at the Institute under Abernathy (many levels under, both literally and figuratively), knowing full well what an unemotional, results-driven bureaucrat he was, that coldness in the face of how serious his injuries were was disconcerting.

Still, he replied, croaking roughly, “Yes.”

Nodding as if pleased but without smiling, Abernathy demanded that he tell him everything he could remember.

“It was 8:30 p.m. when I brought Miss Shepard her evening meds. Everything seemed normal - six guards outside the hallway near the elevator bank and four more in the hallway outside her room, just like usual. I remember hearing the hallway door lock behind me, definitely.”

Miller started coughing, during which time Abernathy impatiently tapped his foot, the staccato impacts of the smooth leather sole against the ceramic tile a quietly muted rhythm beneath the harsh coughing. When the wracking cough continued unabated, Sandy returned with the cup of water, trying to soothe her patient though she was afraid to touch him because of all the broken bones, humerus, radius, ulna, tibia, fibula, femur, hip, and several ribs, the lacerated spleen, the swollen liver, and the punctured lung, then slipping the straw between his blood-spattered lips when the coughing finally slowed. She stayed by his side, across the bed from the Director, even after Miller finished drinking.

While the brunette nurse wiped the frothy blood from Miller’s lips, Abernathy snapped, “Go on, Miller.”

The injured man groaned but continued, “Tina … Miss Shepard … she smiled when I came in and asked how I was doing, just like every night. She seemed totally normal when I gave her the cup of pills and her water, but then I felt a breeze. I remember thinking that was weird, and I think I was about to ask her if she felt anything when she whispered, ‘I’m so sorry, Mr. Miller.’”

“That’s when everything started to move. The noise … it was horrible. Crashing, snapping, banging, cracking. And then the pain. I think she threw the bed at me. That’s the last thing I remember.”

Immediately, Abernathy asked, “Did she say anything else?”

“No. She said hi, asked how I was, and apologised. That’s it.”

“Are you sure she didn’t say anything at all about where she might be going? Last night or any other time?”

“Nothing last night,” Miller confirmed, then added, “We didn’t really talk about much. She was always nice and polite, but quiet.”

Nodding disinterestedly, Abernathy prepared to return to his office on the top floor of the building, thinking about the phone calls he would have to make. Hopefully, they would be able to find and contain or eliminate the threat before he had to alert his superiors and law enforcement. He was almost at the door when the nurse’s rasping croak interrupted his thoughts.

“I just remembered … it might’ve been three or four weeks ago, but she mentioned some guy … I think his name might’ve been Nick. Yeah, Nick. She said she missed him and asked me if I’d lost anyone I love. I got the feeling he was dead. I told my supervisor all about it that night.”

The Director almost smiled. Finally, a clue as to what was in the girl’s mind prior to her escape.

“That’s very helpful, Nurse Miller.”

He could hear the man coughing from behind the closed door as he approached the elevators.

**********

Four hours after interviewing the injured nurse, Director Abernathy’s temples throbbed with a full-blown migraine that had required him to draw the blinds closed and turn off the lights in his office, his patience was hanging from a ragged string, his jaw ached from grinding his teeth, and he thought he might have cracked a crown, but at least he had accomplished a few things, setting necessary plans in motion. However, much to his aggravation, Shepard was still in the wind. His men had found the nurse’s stolen Toyota Prius about an hour earlier, abandoned in a Waffle House parking lot near the Iowa-Illinois border. Nobody in the diner or the nearby gas stations remembered seeing the slim, pretty, blue-eyed blonde who left the Prius, so that was something of a dead end. Where they found the car indicated she was heading east, but where would she go from there? She could continue east all the way to the Atlantic seaboard, head south toward Mexico, backtrack to the west as far as the Pacific Ocean, or even go north to try to sneak into Canada. She had no living relatives and no friends.

One of his earliest calls had been to Nick, but that had proved to be a dead end. They had scared him off nearly seven years before, mere weeks after the Crystal Lake murders, showing him doctored videos of Tina blowing up cars in a rage and forging a letter to him from her telling him she associated him with all the horror and death at Crystal Lake so she never wanted to see him again. It had been gratifyingly easy and effective. He had seemed to believe it all without question then, never again attempting to visit her at Carpenter Memorial or after, and he had even gotten married about three years ago. Still, Abernathy had called Nick immediately after leaving Medical, asking if she had contacted him, warning him that she was suffering a psychotic break and had fled from the mental hospital, that she was definitely a danger to herself and possibly to others, and asking him to call immediately if he heard from or saw her. Nick had sounded very sympathetic and very concerned, but the Director did not doubt that the young man believed every word he said.

The effort to put together a response force was significantly more successful, and he currently had forty-eight trained operatives familiar with psychokinesis and transport on standby, ready to ship out the moment they had a fix on Shepard’s location. A dozen teams of three operatives each had just reached the Waffle House, and they were trying to track where she might have gone from there. The psychologists and researchers who worked with her most intensely were still in the conference room where he had directed them to gather to brainstorm what her potential destination might be. Thus far, the only consensus was that she would not have gone to Wessex County, New Jersey. But they would recover her. Alive or dead. She was far too dangerous to allow among the general public uncontrolled.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything is coming together, closing in on Tina ...
> 
> Questions, comments, criticism, random song lyrics, etc. all welcome!


	6. All Too Familiar

Bound By Rusted Chains 

Chapter VI: All Too Familiar

That had been all too close. Frozen by the blinding terror that turned the blood in her veins to ice crystals with razor-edged facets that slashed throughout her body from within, she had been unable to prevent him from getting far too close to her vulnerable body, so pitifully fragile in comparison with his massive and nearly invulnerable form - close enough that she had caught a hint, wafting on the electrically charged currents of air, of the mildew staining the pillowcase that concealed the rotted horror of his face, tickling her nostrils in an attempt to tease out a sneeze and causing her nose to crinkle in disgust. The thin skin over her throat still tingled from the horrible sensation of those awful, cold, dead fingers that time had reduced to little more than bones yet that somehow remained inhumanly strong, reaching out for her,  _ touching _ her before the power had burst forth from within her to fling the monster back across the breadth of the cottage to where he could not reach her. And just in time. She knew what Jason could do with his hands, the atrocities he was capable of committing as easily as brushing her hair was for her, so she made keeping him as far away from her distressingly vulnerable body as she could until she could escape to the car and drive  _ anywhere  _ else her main goal for the encounter. Her power flinging him all the way to the far wall of the farthest room temporarily accomplished that goal, but he would be back within moments, the uncomfortable clench deep within her gut reminded her, the monster absolutely relentless in his drive to kill.

She thought and hoped her psychokinesis would protect her as it had seven years before, although depending upon a power she still did not fully understand made her squirm uncomfortably. Even after five years of daily exercises meant to strengthen both it and her control over it and tests meant to learn about the nature of the force, the limits of what she could do with it, and the effects of extended use of it upon her, she found having to rely so completely upon something intangible and incomprehensible to save her from a gruesome death at the decayed hand of the notorious Camp Blood Killer difficult to accept. However, while the legendary murderer could not be killed, only restrained (albeit hopefully indefinitely), she knew that she could die. A moment’s inattention in Jason’s presence, though, and she  _ would  _ die. It was a sobering thought that leeched out any slight thrill or feeling of accomplishment she might have felt from successfully deflecting Jason’s first rushing attack.

Catching a hint of movement from the shadowy twilight of the effectively windowless living room, Tina hastily sent out a wave of power, slamming shut the doors to both the living room and the kitchen. Experience, truly awful experience, had taught her that closed doors would barely even slow Jason down, but she felt that any respite from the onslaught, no matter how brief, was worth the effort. And with the monster standing there before her in all his horrifying, decayed glory, it was easy to call upon her telekinetic ability, not requiring her to concentrate upon her worst memories, at least. The more terrifying of her two worst memories stood right there in the flesh in the cottage with her.

Crystalline blue eyes, wide with fear and glittering like sapphires, darted around the kitchen, accompanied by the nervous rattling of the cabinet doors, assessing what she could possibly use to slow the fiend’s attacks, prolonging her life as much as possible. Despite everything she had seen, everything she had done, Tina wanted to live. There had been moments when despair clung to her back or enfolded her in its clammy embrace like a lover, its fanged mouths and talon-tipped limbs sunk deep into her very essence, but she had never given in to its siren-voiced calls to give up despite the more than occasional temptation - no more than she had given up or given in to Jason’s viciously relentless attempts to end her life when she was seventeen.

A crashing crack that seemed almost as loud as the gunfire had been in the narrow concrete hallways of the Institute when she made her escape only a few days earlier alerted her to the fact that the beast had broken through the living room door, so she had no more than a few seconds before he would be in the kitchen again with her.

“Why didn’t you run out the front door and get in the car, dummy?” she asked herself in disgust. “You’re cornered like a rat in here!”

But it was too late to do anything about that, and wasting precious milliseconds bemoaning what she ought to have done was an unwise and potentially fatal distraction. What she needed to do was not to rebuke herself for her mistakes but rather to figure out what she could do to prevent the monster from killing her. She heard Jason’s heavy footsteps against the freshly swept floorboards coming straight toward the kitchen door and felt panic stealing up her spine, tension painfully knotting the muscles of her neck, shoulders, and upper back and drawing them upward with fine wire as if she were a marionette. The researchers had only just begun working with her on creating effective barriers with her telekinesis when she fled the Institute, and she knew she needed significantly more practice before she developed any real skill or proficiency in utilising that defensive technique, but she tried anyway. Trying to ignore the distracting tickle of cold sweat gathering at her temples and trickling steadily down the knobs of her spine, she focused upon fortifying the old wooden door with its rusted hinges to the best of her ability. Not even a heartbeat later, the door shuddered on its hinges as if something large and heavy had been flung at it, but the barrier she erected with her mind held. Shaking with fear and trying to keep her mind entirely focused upon her single goal, Tina concentrated upon putting everything she had into bolstering the thin piece of wood separating her from Death. The door shuddered again, actually bowing inward slightly at the immense force that was Jason Voorhees flinging himself bodily into it, and she whimpered in terror, sounding to her ears like a kicked puppy. 

But the door, reinforced by her power, still held strong.

Another heartbeat later, another loud thud of flesh and bone against wood that resonated through the room actually sent cracks radiating through the door, centred around where his shoulder must have struck it nearly six feet high, ripping another pathetic little whimper from between her trembling lips.

The door remained standing within its frame.

Silence followed, oppressive and tense. The cabinet doors had ceased their incessant banging when she directed all of her focus toward the door. Nearly hyperventilating, each breath burning like acid into her straining lungs, her mind bolting from one dreadful thought to another and wondering what the monster on the other side could be planning, and her body beset by faint tremors that shuddered through her limbs at irregular intervals, Tina waited. Her mind recoiling from the many images of violent death she had seen here before, she began counting her heartbeats in an unsuccessful attempt to fill the part of her mind not occupied with sustaining the barrier with  _ anything  _ but the pitifully broken bodies she had seen and trying to brace herself for when he managed to break through. That he would come storming through the doorway, bearing down upon her like some grotesquely macabre god of vengeance, she did not doubt. It was a matter of when, not if, and that knowledge inflamed her singing nerves. The anticipation itself was physically painful.

At thirty-one heartbeats, the silence was shattered by a loud crack as the centre of the door splintered around the black iron head of a fire poker. Almost as quickly as it had appeared, the ugly chunk of metal was withdrawn, leaving a hole slightly larger than her hand in the wood. Somehow, she was able to resist the urge to peek through the crack, not wanting to have to see the terrible living corpse. Instead, she found herself creeping backward away from the doorway and toward the pantry. Before she made it two steps, though, the poker slammed back into the door, breaking through the splintering wood with seemingly even more ferocity than the first blow, but amazingly the door still stood.

Tina doubted the door could maintain its structural integrity through even one more such blow. When it was reduced to splinters or came down, all that would stand between her and Jason was her power, that ephemeral thing she did not fully understand even though it was a part of her. She hoped that it would be enough.

**********

Furious at having been thrown across the breadth of the house as if he were some sort of a toy tossed aside by a child in the midst of a tantrum, Jason strode forward over mouldy carpet to the fireplace and picked up the poker in one almost fleshless hand. Glaring down at it with his single eye through the hole he tore in the pillowcase he wore currently as a mask, he tested the heft of the solid bar of black iron, slicing the air before him with sharp precision, the weight of the poker as nothing to him. It was not as good as the axe that the little blonde had ripped from his hand and flung off to the side without even moving, but it was satisfactory. Turning toward the kitchen where he knew she remained, waiting for him, he only managed to take two steps before the door before him slammed shut nearly striking him in the face with such violent force it vibrated in its frame and he recoiled backward a pace at the shock. Less than a moment later than the living room door shut abruptly, he heard the door to the kitchen slam shut. What passed for lips upon his rotted face twisted into a hideous facsimile of a smirk when his preternaturally acute hearing failed to detect over the staccato din of rattling cabinet doors the scampering of little feet racing toward the empty, jagged hole he had made of the front door.

She had just trapped herself in the house. With him.

In three long strides, the enraged beast reached the door, kicking it open with a satisfying crash, though he would have preferred the impact shivering up the exposed bone of his shin to have been the blonde girl’s chest caving in around his heavy, black work boot, her delicate white bones splintering beneath the force of the blow. His mind filled with images of Tina’s broken body lying crumpled before him, Jason stalked across the foyer and tried to kick down the kitchen door just as he had the living room door, but it barely budged. His outraged anger boiling in his heaving, dead chest, he flung himself at the door, but though he could feel the wood bowing outward when his great weight slammed into it, it stubbornly refused to open. Hearing the girl’s pathetic whimper, he redirected his momentum, and again he launched himself bodily at the door, momentarily gratified at the sound of wood cracking … but somehow,  _ impossibly _ , despite the impacts of his immensely strong and  _ heavy  _ body, it remained standing defiantly within its frame, closed against him. Mocking him.

Rising frustration mingling with his fury into a sour, dissatisfying liquid that rose from his throat to coat his tongue like bile, he stepped back from the door and examined it, wondering how it managed to continue to thwart him. It was just another ordinary, old, wooden door secured within its frame with rusting hinges, appearing no different from the living room door that had submitted so easily to his application of force. So why did it continue to obstruct his path, keeping him from his prey? And, perhaps more importantly,  _ how  _ had it not given way and burst open under his assault?

Merely being blocked and braced with a piece of furniture would not account for the door’s failure to yield, and he had broken down enough such barricades to know how that sort of impact felt against his flesh. This door was reinforced by something else, something simultaneously solid yet ever so slightly flexible, and his stomach clenched sourly as he considered what might be responsible, knowing what he did of his quarry.

He hated her. Purely and completely.

He had never felt such hatred for anyone or anything before, and the sheer force of the emotion surging through him would have been unsettling; indeed, it would have alarmed him if not for the intensity of his drive to not only kill but to destroy utterly and completely - a compulsion that kept any such contemplation from his mind restrained behind the burning haze of his blended duty, need, fury, and desire to obliterate. Even the trespassers who befouled the land that he was duty-bound to defend had always failed to evoke true hatred in him. Although he hated their presence, the contaminating noise and filth they brought with them, it was never personal - he was obligated by his mother’s need for vengeance and by the forces that had resurrected him and continued to drive him to eradicate them, to take their lives and give them to the earth and water they polluted by stepping onto land that belonged entirely to Nature and not to Man. The fact that they came to that unhallowed, sacred place seeking thrills and amusement enraged him, but he felt nothing at all for his victims themselves beyond the compelling need to kill them as quickly and efficiently as possible. Not even those who had escaped - those whose names haunted him with an awful sense of incompletion requiring action and rectification as soon as he had dealt with the vexing matter at hand - had earned his hatred. Not even the boy who had killed him then returned as a man to pull him back into the faint semblance of life he retained was  _ hated _ . But Tina, that inoffensive girl who appeared so fragile yet possessed a power beyond his comprehension, was something else entirely.

Something terrible. Something he hated to the core of his being.

Something he had to destroy.

Deciding upon a different approach, Jason swung the poker into the door, right where his shoulder had cracked the wood, gratified by the sight of it splintering around the black iron embedded in it as the impact shivered up his arms. Without waiting a single moment, he wrenched it free and slammed it again into the small hole in the wood created by his shoulder and the first swing of the poker. This time, when he tore it from the door, he saw his terrified prey backing away, her chest rising and falling rapidly with each shallowly gasped breath and her fear-widened blue eyes shimmering as if filled with unshed tears in her bloodless face. The view through the hole also confirmed his suspicion that she had not barricaded the door against him with anything physical, though that knowledge brought him no relief.

His deep concern, too, was confirmed thereby - she  _ was  _ stronger than the last time their paths had crossed; he was almost certain she had been unable to use that dreadful, incomprehensible power to block doorways then, or else she would have done more than merely slamming doors in his face. Neither had she been able to throw him across the room as nonchalantly as tossing a crumpled napkin into the trash. He did not truly fear the girl, comfortable in his certainty that he could not be killed, at least not permanently, but her power made him uneasy.  _ She,  _ slender slip of a girl that she was, made him uneasy - and for that alone she had to die.

Slamming the poker into the door over and over, sharp shards of wood flying back and him and bouncing harmlessly off the invisible barrier Tina’s mind conjured to impede him, Jason hacked at the wood until the hole grew large enough to allow his hulking form entry into her pitiful refuge. He lunged forward through the splintered remains of the door, only to slam into an invisible wall as hard and unyielding as concrete. A low, feral growl rumbled through his broad chest, and he was almost pleased by the girl’s soft moan of terror that accosted his ears at the bestial sound. His arm swang back, then the poker crashed into the solid nothingness preventing him from reaching his quarry, his wrath lending more power to the blow. Though the invisible barrier failed to give way, he continued pummelling it, his strength indefatigable. Eventually, it  _ would _ fail, even if only when the girl maintaining it fell to exhaustion. Then, he could finish off her sleeping body. Though he preferred not to wait so long, the Camp Blood Killer was nothing if not patient.

**********

Much to Tina’s horror, it took very little time for the monster to reduce the door separating them to so many useless shards of wood, leaving nothing between them except empty space and the psychokinetic wall she had erected - a wall that was requiring barely less than all of her attention to sustain. And when it failed … 

Hearing the low growl emanating from the monster - a sound more suited to some great, deadly ravening beast than a man, regardless of how fearsome and nearly inhuman that man might be, the only sound she had ever heard from him other than a low grunt of what she assumed was pain even though he seemed all but immune thereto - raised every hair upon her body on end, and an involuntary moan of absolute horror escaped her. She did not know how long she could maintain the barrier, and she could  _ feel  _ every immensely powerful impact striking it, could feel it weakening under the relentless flurry of blows, and she wanted to cry.

But tears would do her no good against the emotionless, remorseless killer. She knew all too well that Jason Voorhees was not moved by his victims’ tears. As far as she had seen, he was moved by nothing at all. From everything she knew about him, the only reason his body even “lived” was to kill.

So she braced herself, using every trick and meditative technique the researchers at the Institute had taught her alongside those she had learned on her own to try to fortify and sustain both the invisible wall and herself, even though it was the most difficult and exhausting use of her power she had discovered so far since it first manifested in that awful emotional outburst that had killed her father in the same lake where the beast straining before her had died as a child. Terror coursing through her, rattling along the highways of her nerves and streaming with the blood her racing heart pumped through her veins, she hazarded a glance around the room, desperately seeking anything with which she could defend herself despite knowing that any slight lapse in her concentration could allow the barricade built by her will and composed of nothing but her power to collapse. That it  _ would _ collapse was something she accepted reluctantly as inevitable, and the immeasurable force of Jason’s ceaseless assault thereupon showed no sign of weakening, unlike it, so she  _ had  _ to be prepared for when it failed and allowed him into the room with her. The monster was tireless, just as driven to kill as she was to live, but she knew she lacked his stamina even if the power she mostly controlled was a match to his brutal strength and determination. He was a force of nature, just as she was, but she was already tired when her nightmare had crashed through the door to her sanctuary, a thought that threatened to pitch her headlong into the hungry mouth of despair - however, she could not give in to it. She outright refused.

Seeing everything in the small kitchen that she possibly could put to use, recalling the locations of objects within the house that might aid in her survival served to fortify her, allowing her to re-centre herself and redirect the entirety of herself into maintaining the barrier between her and Death. Despite the horrible feeling of her protection bowing inward toward her beneath the nonstop barrage with each impact of the poker against solid nothingness, she  _ would  _ hold it steady.

Then something intangible yet sharp stabbed forcefully into her chest, impaling her with a sensation like pain although it was not physical that doubled her over, stealing her breath from her like a kiss or a suddenly spasming wave of nausea.

And that was when the wall came down.

**********

Jason’s rage only grew, intensifying exponentially beyond anything he had felt with each blow he struck, and although he thought he could feel the invisible barrier keeping him from his cowering prey flex slightly more every time the poker he wielded bounced off it despite the incredible power his fury gave his blows, he could not break through it. However, he was certain that he could outlast the frightened girl, and he was equally certain that he would destroy the nothing-wall he began to feel was silently mocking him by its resolute refusal to submit to his strength. Mockery was something he could not bear - a reminder of his pained, lonely youth when the only interactions he ever had with other children always took that form - and it further incensed him. His failure to destroy something so insubstantial he could not even  _ see _ it irked him in a way nothing else ever had, just like its architect, the pale slip of a girl whose terrified eyes were darting about the almost completely empty room in the long-abandoned house like a pair of wild, gleaming indigo buntings trapped in a cage, did to him. Each time the nothingness standing steadfast and impenetrable repelled the poker’s frenzied assault served to strengthen his indefatigable arm and his resolve to obliterate both it and her. 

How long he stood there pounding his outrage against a foe he could not see to get to the one he could was irrelevant to him. The sum total of the killer’s hunt-honed focus had been narrowed down to an unseen barrier that bowed but would not break and a slender blonde who stared at him, flinching subtly with every blow. Every subtle twitch of her tensed muscles, the rapid and ever so slightly uneven rise and fall of her chest beneath the thin, faded fabric of her loose-fitting shirt, the shimmering sweat beaded at her temples and sliding down the long, slender neck around which his fingers yearned to wrap themselves, aching with the desire to squeeze until her vertebrae were ground to dust within his clenched fist - it all broadcasted with perfectly legible clarity the intensity of her dread which he could see hovered precariously upon the edge of outright panic. Although Tina was still standing there mere feet beyond his ability to reach her, wordlessly taunting him with her proximity, the fine trembling of her slender body and the scent of her fear-sweat reached his nostrils, even through the invisible barrier separating them and the mildew-infused fabric wrapped around his face, and he found it strangely invigorating. 

Terror so often blinded his victims to the true source of the threat. Adrenaline and the prey-drive to flee rendered them clumsy and incautious even as it rapidly drained their energy reserves - and his natural, innate proficiency at taking advantage of such weaknesses had developed over time with experience into absolutely masterful expertise. Despite the time he had spent wrapped in chains beneath the water of Crystal Lake, his body unmoving aside from the slowly progressing decay as the years passed by (in fact, he had discovered that the only time his body rotted was when it was fully dead, which he had come to believe it never would be again, or when he was bound unmoving within the lake), he had faith in his ability to read his prey’s body language accurately, to recognise the moment when the balance shifted and building fatigue began to outweigh the waning effects of adrenaline and know the time to attack had arrived.

As he watched her, hatred glittering bright in his single eye, the swinging of his arm a nearly rhythmic onslaught against the wall he could only feel in the impacts reverberating up his arm but could not see, the girl finally faltered. Her whole body clenched, slim arms clutching at her belly, wrapping tightly around her middle as she doubled over as if in pain, and the barrier gave way. Jason almost stumbled, the momentum of the powerful blow his body was prepared to feel deflected back toward him pulling him forward and down instead, but his reflexes allowed him to catch himself, transforming it into a smooth, deliberate step toward his prey. Clenching his teeth so hard his jaw spasmed in protest, the corners of his mouth turned up in a predatory grin now that his path was cleared. He gripped the poker in two hands, fists flexing around the handle with a grip like a steel trap, determined not to allow Tina to wrench this weapon from his grasp as she had the axe.

As he took another step forward toward her, the murderous anticipation rolling off him in waves manifesting as a very nearly visible presence in the small kitchen, Tina straightened up slightly and began creeping backwards away from him, some deep animal instinct left over from before civilisation removed Man from the great beasts’ diets to make herself small and hide from the massive predator stalking toward her driving her. Unable to look away from the monster bearing a heavy iron poker as he loomed ever closer, she was transfixed by the cat-green eye glaring at her through the ragged hole in the dirty old pillowcase she felt thankful hid the horror of his ruined face - an image of Hell itself seared indelibly into her mind’s eye that she feared would haunt her even on her deathbed. She reached out with a part of her that sent the cabinet doors into paroxysms of terrified shuddering upon their hinges, but it was not they that the fingers of power she sent forth sought. 

The mop bucket, still half-full of dirty bleach water she had not yet dumped, floated up with fluid grace from the sink, rising as if lifted by unseen hands, then whipped itself across the floor directly at the masked killer’s head. Able to hear the water sloshing though he could not actually see the bucket whizzing toward his ear because the pillowcase around his head obscured his peripheral vision, Jason turned abruptly to face it, swinging the poker on instinct like a bat before his mind and time to register what he saw, the force of the blow against aged plastic so great that the side of the bucket cracked around the sharp-tipped black iron bar impaling it. Upon impact, the burning stench of bleach accosted his nostrils through thin, mildewed fabric as it splashed onto him, soaking into the rags covering his body as he shook the poker violently, trying to dislodge it from the bucket in which it was embedded, aiming it so the cracked plastic cylinder flew directly toward Tina’s face when he managed to jerk the iron bar free. Reflexively, Tina raised an arm to protect her face, but it was her power that sent the broken bucket flying to the side to bounce harmlessly off the wall above the avocado green stove.

And still Jason advanced toward her.

One of the long fluorescent bulbs swung down from the ceiling when Tina’s head tilted subtly toward her left shoulder, slamming into his face, but unlike the heavy light fixture that had knocked him backwards completely off his feet to crash heavily through the staircase seven years earlier, he only hesitated for less than an instant, shaking his head in irritation to clear off the delicate, thin shards of glass clinging to the folds in the carefully twisted pillowcase he had formed to fit his face. This was all too familiar, everything about it dredging up all of the unpleasant feelings - the confusion, uncertainty, incomprehension, shock, and that awful gnawing sensation that felt far too close to fear - that he had experienced the first time he attempted to kill the pretty little blonde who had proved to be a monster in her own right. The next two bulbs striking his face simultaneously had just as little effect, only further enraging the beast, and Tina realised that if she retreated just four more steps, her back would be pressed flush against the pantry door.

From there, she could retreat no farther,  _ forcing  _ her onto the offensive against a beast far more competent and comfortable with that than she. Dread and its destructive sister panic crept up on her from behind, their stealthy approach unseen but not unfelt. Facing the monster from the lake with her shoulder blades pressing into an unyielding wall was a position in which she felt desperate to avoid finding herself.

Her heart pounding so loudly in her ears that she could not hear the broken glass crunching beneath Jason’s heavy, black boots that ground them into dust upon the peeling linoleum, she reached out in rising panic with her power for the axe firmly embedded in the wall. She focused all of her fear upon it, sending it flying end over end with all the force she could muster straight for the middle of his neck. To her absolute horror, one of his awful, bony hands jerked free from the handle of the poker and easily caught the axe whipping through the air before it could make contact with the decayed flesh attaching his head to his body. She moaned softly, despair bearing down upon her even more swiftly than the approaching juggernaut, falling back another three steps. She could feel the presence of the closed pantry door -  _ it just had to open outward, didn’t it, because her luck was such utter shit … if not for bad luck, she’d have no luck at all  _ \- looming only one more step behind her 

How had she ever believed she could stop him? Her survival before had been little more than a rare stroke of good luck combined with the distraction provided by Nick and the eventual intervention of her father’s corpse. But she was alone now, facing her worst nightmare, Death itself made flesh, with nobody to distract it, nobody to protect her - just her and Jason and a power over which she had far less control than she needed … 

There was a part of her that wanted to give up, a soft voice within urging her to stop fighting so he could kill her quickly and cleanly before she suffered several horribly painful injuries … after which he would still kill her. Her death was inevitable. Why draw it out any longer? Why increase the potential for long minutes of agonising pain beforehand?

Instead of obeying that quiet yet horrifyingly persuasive urge cajoling her to give in to that fate if only to avoid worse, Tina clenched her hands into fists, raised her chin, and glared defiantly back at the killer. She saw something flicker in his pale green eye, but she neither knew what it was or what it meant. All she knew was that it made her knees weak, sent shivers running roughshod down her spine, and clenched her bladder so hard it ached.

Which somehow, improbably strengthened her resolve.

She gestured slightly with her chin, an almost imperceptible movement that led Jason to narrow his eye suspiciously right before both the axe and the poker forcibly ripped themselves from his preternaturally strong hands to be sent flying in opposite directions where they stuck shuddering in the plaster walls. His eye went wide in affronted shock, and he did not even have time for a single breath before the floor opened beneath him with a loud, crashing and cracking roar, dropping him into the cellar below.

The instant Jason fell, that large, rotted body clad in shredded tatters of dark fabric of an indeterminate colour that might once have been navy blue or hunter green disappearing from view, Tina ran for the door, too terrified to imagine what sort of weapons he might find down in the darkness she had not yet ventured to explore. She knew that her only chance at survival was to make it to the stolen car and drive away. 

Far away. 

And never return to the renamed town of Forest Green or the accursed forest surrounding Crystal Lake.

**********

Infuriated that the damned girl had disarmed him yet  _ again,  _ Jason’s stomach lurched up into his throat as the floor gave way beneath him and jagged shards of linoleum-clad wood tore at his clothing and flesh, thinking this was all horribly familiar. But his fall was halted before he crashed to the ground some twelve feet below by the staircase upon which he landed heavily with a barely audible grunt, the first step he struck cracking in half beneath his weight. However, the second step held up to the impact, and he wasted no time in pulling himself back up into the kitchen through the hole in the floor, not even bothering to ascend the stairs and push open the trapdoor in his rush to catch his prey before she could escape. Gnashing his teeth in wrathful frustration, his chest heaving, he turned toward the doorway to the foyer, ready and determined to resume the chase and hunt her down until she lay dead at his feet.

At the same time, Tina had almost reached the front door when she stopped dead, looking around in desperation.

_ The keys! Where did I leave the fucking keys? _

Knowing she had no time to waste before Jason would recover from the fall and resume the chase, she wracked her brain, trying to remember where she had put them. When it finally came to her, barely a heartbeat later though it felt like an eternity had passed, a choked sob stole its way out of her mouth.

_ They’re back on the kitchen counter beside the sink. _

_ I’m screwed. _

Hesitantly, she turned back toward the kitchen, and when the ghastly sight of the monster did not meet her gaze, she took one step back toward the kitchen. Another. Despite her hurried wariness, she failed to notice the macabre pair of mostly defleshed hands gripping the edge of the hole in the floor, and she had reached the battered doorway before the large figure of the killer erupted upward from below in a shower of splinters and dust.

With a shrill shriek, Tina turned and ran. She thought she felt a slight pull, something brushing against the flapping back of her shirt, grabbing at her, and the implicit threat in the chilling sensation was enough to distract her just long enough to stumble over a large piece of the front door that cut into her shin, throwing her off balance and tipping her sideways … away from the empty doorway and toward the staircase leading to the second floor. She had no time to correct her path - Jason was far too close - so she scrambled frantically up the stairs, not yet feeling the pain of her bleeding leg in her desperation to avoid the grotesquely decayed hands that reached for her, intent upon tearing her body apart limb from limb.

When the girl lost her balance then raced  _ up the stairs  _ instead of running toward the greater potential of escape  _ out the front door _ , Jason’s mouth again twitched into its distorted semblance of a smile. Once upstairs, there was nowhere she could go, and she would have to pass through him in order to escape - and he was catching on to her tricks. She might be able to hold him back behind an invisible wall, but she could not hold it in place forever, he had seen. She could throw objects at him, but he could deflect them, and even if some should strike him they would not do permanent damage. She could even throw him, apparently, but he was quick to recover, nearly unaffected by pain even though he still felt it sing along his dead nerves, and he was all but certain he could not be killed. Despite her awful power, he believed that she would falter or make a mistake soon enough, and he would be there to end her miserable life the moment she did.

He started up the stairs, doing nothing to disguise the heavy sound of his footsteps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This turned out a bit longer than expected but UNHOLY HELLFUCK was it fun to write!
> 
> Questions, comments, and criticism are highly appreciated!


	7. TRAPPED

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Questions, comments, criticism? Would love to hear y’all’s thoughts!

Chapter VII - TRAPPED!

Ascending a staircase should not be difficult for a healthy 24-year-old woman in good physical shape, but in her almost mindless panic Tina’s sneakers slipped on the slick, uncarpeted hardwood of the steps, causing her bad knee to ache dully and threatening to turn her ankles or slam her sprawling face-first onto the next step as she fled, racing to escape the horrifying death following close … so close … _too close_ … behind her. Each shuddering breath abraded her burning lungs, seemingly tearing at the delicate tissue like serrated blades, and her frenzied heart was throwing itself frantically against her imprisoning rib cage. When she finally reached the landing, her feet failed to recognise that there were no more steps to climb and blindly strained to keep climbing upward, tripping her. Momentum sent her flying forward, off balance, gravity yanking her downward, and she fell heavily onto her hands and knees, catching herself when they hit the worn hardwood floor. 

Hard.

Wildly, her palms and knees tingling from the force of the impact, she scrambled to her feet, hearing the heavy, steady tread of Jason’s boots on the steps behind her ringing hollowly like a slow series of bells tolling her death knell.

_He_ **knew** _she was trapped now. Once he reached the second storey, there was nowhere left for her to go. Even if she tried to hide, he would find her quickly - the house was too small and offered too few places where she could hide. There was no way for her to escape him, not with his large and immensely, inhumanly strong body standing between her and the only exit. He wasn’t even hurrying to chase after her now. There was no need for him to rush after her. She knew that_ **he knew** _he had her._

Tina’s panic took on an edge of nausea, her stomach clenching violently in rebellion against those despairing thoughts as she ran down the long, narrow hallway dimly illuminated by the light coming from the open bedroom windows, shining through the open doors and through the broken triangular window at the end of the hallway. 

_The end of the line._

Not wanting to be caught again with her back pressed up against the wall, she skidded to a halt in front of the bathroom and stood, gasping for air. The long gash in her calf torn by the shard of broken door suddenly made itself known with a sharply aching pulse all its own, and she glanced down at it. Cringing, a horrified whine sneaked past her lips at the sight of her blood dripping down the ripped leg of her jeans that fit snugly over the gracefully curving muscle, staining the rough, deep cobalt fabric and painting the whiteness of her sock a bright, carnival red.

She hated the sight of blood. It brought back too many memories that stabbed into her pounding heart. Memories that all began here, in this haunted forest where a children’s summer camp once stood, full of the joyous, carefree laughter of youth before it was transformed into screams and blood.

Tina found herself shaking uncontrollably from the icy dread welling up inside her, the dangling bathroom door trembling with her upon its squeaking hinge, and she could hear the mirrored medicine cabinet rattle anxiously in reply. Looking around the nearly barren hallway wildly, she assessed what she could possibly use to defend herself and tried to remember the locations of everything she could recall that lay concealed from her sight behind the bedroom walls. _Anything_ might prove useful against him, and she discounted _nothing_ as a potential weapon. She thought, _hoped_ that she had learned a great deal from her first encounter with Jason about just how useful ordinary household items could be in fending off so relentless an attacker, and she could not afford to overlook even the most seemingly insignificant objects.

The rhythmic boom of methodical footsteps from the stairway resounded ever closer, and she wondered if he was approaching her so slowly because he felt certain he had her cornered and felt no need to hurry. Or, might it be that his casual pace was meant to cause her to suffer in anticipation and dread for as long as possible - what if his intent was to further destroy her already shattered nerves, rendering her ever clumsier with fear (and, if it was, she could not deny how effective a ploy it was turning out to be)? 

Or could it even be trepidation, fear of what _she_ might do to _him_?

But the why did not matter. His motives in climbing the stairs at a steady, slow and even pace, _whatever_ they might be, were irrelevant in the end. His only true motive, the only one that mattered, was to see her dead.

Regardless of how he chose to approach her, one thing was certain and inevitable - Jason was coming for her.

**********

There was no need for him to hurry. Not anymore. In her haste to escape, the foolish girl had tripped over the door he had torn from its frame, veering off balance toward the staircase instead of toward the front door from where she could have run anywhere - into the woods or toward the garage where her vehicle waited to carry her away - inadvertently trapping herself, placing him bodily between herself and the only exit. Although he did not take pride in killing, per se, or even in his tracking and hunting skill, he found his ability to render people reckless through the panic he instilled satisfying. Jason might have found Tina’s frantic misstep and the mistake it caused her to make amusing; however, he was perfectly aware that this did not mean that she had accidentally made killing her as easy for him as it would have been with any other victim who made the same error.

Much to his bitter consternation, nothing about hunting the fragile-looking blonde girl ever turned out to be as easy as it ought to have been.

Although he had learned that the battered front door directly behind him was the only exit in his examination of the small, derelict house as he stalked around it searching for his hidden prey, he did not know what lay upstairs that she might use against him. She had already demonstrated that there was almost nothing she could not either throw at him or use to restrain him - from tree branches and vines to sofas and other furniture, power lines, lamps, roofing nails, petrol, cords, light fixtures, potted plants, buckets of mop water, and even fire. At least she had not slammed a television set down upon his head like that other slender blonde girl and her tricky brat of a brother or tried to disguise herself as Mommy to manipulate him and lull him into a false sense of security before striking (that particular, _awful_ girl had even dared to defile his sainted mother’s shrine - touching her clothes, wearing her sweater! And, to add insult to injury, she had escaped the death she so richly deserved. Knowing that the Fields girl was still alive, still walking around and drawing breath despite her sacrilege, chewed ceaselessly upon his soul), he supposed. But, he had withstood it all and could again, so although Tina and her strange power made him uneasy because he found them and her to be unpredictable and incomprehensible, he did not fear her.

No, he just hated her.

When Jason heard her running footsteps come to a sudden stop overhead, he hoped that she had been frozen in place by her terror of him. He found himself relishing Tina’s fear as he never had with any of his previous victims. Not being sadistic by nature and killing trespassers at Crystal Lake simply because it was his duty rather than anything akin to a pleasure, his sole purpose in intentionally inciting terror within those he hunted was to break their concentration, to render them frantic, incautious, and clumsy, and therefore easily killed. Their fear was a means to an end, not the end itself. Even if he could speak, he could not have put into words why he responded so differently to Tina than to any of the hundred plus people he had killed during his long existence (he had never bothered to keep count, and he only bothered trying to remember the names and faces of those few trespassers who had managed to escape him - but those were indelibly etched in his mind) - why he felt hatred for her that burned with such immense heat it scalded his dead yet undying guts where he never truly _hated_ anyone before, why he desired her fear for its own sake and not only to render her uncoordinated, panicking and vulnerable, so she would make more mistakes that would make it that much easier for him to kill her, but rather to increase her suffering.

And oh! how he wanted her to suffer.

Every beat of his dead, blackened heart pumped a poisonous brew of adrenaline, rage, and hatred through his veins as he reached the last few steps. He could hear the nervous clattering of objects around her well before he could see the trembling little blonde staring wild-eyed at the head of the stairs, the noise urging him to caution even though he knew that she could not truly harm him. Still, the ruckus and the sight of her feathery golden hair floating around her pale face on air currents pregnant with potential energy reminded him of everything she had done to stop him, the confusing, unsettling images and unpleasant sensations flickering in rapid succession like an old movie through his mind.

**********

Not even a minute had passed since she stumbled into the upstairs hallway, but each second seemed to drag on and on. Each bradycardic heartbeat echoed hollowly within her, even though she retained some slight awareness of reality - she knew that her pounding heart was racing at more than double its ordinary resting pace despite how slow it seemed to her - as if her mind was unable to cope with the monster’s inexorable approach and therefore was trying to give her more time to think and plan than she actually had. At least she did not have to worry about heightening her emotions to a level whereby the strange, destructive power within her could extend outward - she could _hear_ Dr. Crews snapping in her ear, “It happens when your emotions are at their peak!”

Just knowing that Jason had arisen was enough to keep her emotions at their peak, even if he were not currently stalking her with her death in mind. Simply being at Crystal Lake was wreaking havoc upon her mental state even before he found her, and knowing that even if she survived and escaped, the Institute would be tracking her down soon enough, was more than enough to turn her nerves all topsy-turvy. So why did she not just give up? Why bother fighting when it was so obvious that she was doomed to a bleak life at best and a truly dreadful death at worst? 

Then, with no apparent trigger that she could perceive, time snapped back to normal in a rush of clarity that physically shook her. Time had run out. First, the pillowcase concealing the monster’s terrible, rotted face floated up into view, white and ghostly, followed by his broad shoulders and then his chest, steadily rising as he ascended toward the second floor. His wide chest heaved with every breath he took, and she found herself wondering inanely why he breathed at all. Surely a corpse did not need oxygen to sustain itself, “living” or not, and how could Jason have “survived” beneath the clear, green water of Crystal Lake for so many years if he required air? And, perhaps more importantly, why was she thinking about that at a time like this, when the entirety of her mind should be focused upon nothing but what she must do to survive it?

Tina knew she had to stop him, that she could not allow him to reach the hallway where she stood. The single green eye fixed upon her, spearing her, radiated such unadulterated malevolence that she nearly lost the battle against the urge to tear her gaze from his and look away. _Run away_. But he could move so quickly, his current easy, measured pace nothing but a ruse, and with nowhere to go to dodge his impending attack in the narrow hallway, turning her focus away from him for even a moment could … and probably would … be fatal. Merely _blinking_ in Jason’s presence was dangerous.

Too anxious to wait for the first of his heavy black work boots to settle upon the same floor upon which she stood, she clenched her fine-boned hands into fists and tilted her chin to the left - in the direction of the three rooms that lined the hallway - visualising the shallow closet than ran the length of the smaller of the two bedrooms, the power housed within her obeying the unspoken command the exact moment she thought it.

**********

Jason’s entire body vibrated with the tension of anticipation and contained kinetic energy, the heavy muscles of his arms and shoulders taut, prepared to rise and block whatever might come hurtling through the air at him as he mounted the third to last stair. The air, too, was electric with energy only barely contained, rendering it almost too thick to breathe, and the sense of imminent cataclysm was only exacerbated by the uneasy clatter coming from empty rooms. In the back of his mind, a niggling concern questioned whether the stairs would support his weight if he were flung backward to land heavily upon the staircase, or if he might crash through and fall all the way to the floor over twelve feet below in a repeat of the last time he had chased Tina up a flight of stairs. An involuntary growl rose up through his chest at that memory and the high probability that he would endure something similar before he managed to end the troublesome little blonde’s life, but he managed to crush it down before emitting a sound, his partially skeletonised hands clenching into fists.

Even before he finally had managed to track her there, it appeared that she had unleashed her awful power within the second floor of the house - one of the three doors lining one side of the hallway hung askew from a single hinge and the plaster wall opposite an empty door frame was impaled by the door embedded in it like a huge wooden cleaver. Were he not so intently, single-mindedly focused upon the girl’s death, he might have wondered what had triggered her to destroy while she was alone in an abandoned building in a deserted area. However, his eternally goal-oriented mind was wholly focused upon his single objective: how to get to Tina Shepard and _destroy her_.

Despite the many disconcerting similarities with the first time Tina had raised him from the lake, this time _would not_ end the same way - he would not allow it. She had caught him by surprise before, but now he was prepared for her.

When his leading foot landed upon the last step, that anticipatory tension paid off. He heard the strange, high whistling sound, not entirely unlike the sound of a loosed arrow slicing the air on its way to its target, before he saw anything, his peripheral vision partially obscured by the pillowcase hiding his face - even more so than it had been by the hockey mask the same damnable girl had cracked in half years before, and that realisation triggered a surge of deep resentment. However, even through the stained fabric, he could hear well enough to track the object’s approach accurately, and even before it came into view, his arm jerked up to deflect what he finally saw was a wire coat hanger. It bounced harmlessly off his forearm and fell to skitter across the floor, coming up rest at Tina’s feet. With a strangled little gasp, she recoiled from it as if it were a snake rearing up to strike.

But even as she fell back half a pace and before he had a chance to lower his arm, he saw her chin jerk in that familiar manner, and nearly a dozen more hangers came flying at him, and at significantly greater velocity. Turning slightly to face the room from which the barrage originated, it was easy and painless for him to block this rather pointless-seeming assault, as well.

However, even though she had doubted that the coat hangers could do much harm to the behemoth, using them actually had two purposes - the first of which she was pleased to see they had served rather well. They had caused him to halt his advance toward her, albeit only momentarily, just as she intended. _Now, to see if they could serve their second - and far more important - purpose similarly effectively …_

The instant Jason’s body shifted to grant him an unobstructed view of the source of Tina’s hoard of improvised “weapons,” she reached out with invisible fingers of pure power for the bathroom door that hung awry from a single hinge, tearing that small bit of rusted, squealing metal from the wall, wrenching the rectangle of solid wood from its frame and launching it at the distracted killer with as much force as her current terror and horrifying memories could grant her. For a moment, she dared to hope that it would work, that the door would catch him off guard, that it would knock him down - or, better yet, down _through_ \- the staircase behind him. But _something_ must have alerted him to the danger - perhaps a sound or maybe even a change in the air. However, whatever it was that caught his attention, it allowed Jason to react in time. Far more quickly than any man so large should have been capable of moving, he ascended the last step to the second storey and pressed his thickly muscled body flat against the wall, but he was too large and the hallway was too narrow to allow the heavy wooden door to pass by him entirely unscathed. Rather than permitting it to scrape its way past his back before crashing down to the floor below, he reared back and punched his fist through the thick board. As the force of the impact shuddered up his arm and the door shattered into sharp shards that fell harmlessly at his feet, what little of his lips that remained upon that ruined horror of a face twisted into a ghastly caricature of a smile that would have chilled the blood into solid ice within Tina’s veins and frozen her heart dead in her chest were his decayed, twisted and deformed features not hidden from view beneath the pillowcase.

Any relief she might have hoped to feel died within her when her ploy to distract him from the door she had intended to use to knock him backward off his feet and down, away from her all too breakable body, for a respite from his attacks, no matter how temporary, failed so completely. Not only had she failed to force Jason away from her, but he had managed to reach the second floor of the cottage in the process - exactly what she had been hoping to prevent for as long as possible. 

Her throat felt as tight as if Jason’s grotesque, mostly defleshed hand were wrapped around it, squeezing roughly, making it difficult for her to drag air into her lungs and increasing her nearly-panicked terror. Before he had time to react to his successful deflection of the attack and press his advantage, Tina felt the power flow through her, heady and intoxicating and strong, reminding her that she _could_ actually _fight_ him - that she was not merely limited to trying to stop him from hurting her for as long as possible. It went _completely_ against her nature, but it would not be the first time she had turned her power against another and gone on the offensive - not even the first time she had done so to him, although she cringed away from the awful memory of him ripping out the roofing nail she had shot into his forehead and the stench of burning flesh and petrol that pervaded the dank basement when she finally, reluctantly resorted to setting him on fire in her desperation. Mere days had passed since she had used her power to cut a blood soaked (unintentionally so, but violent and very likely deadly nonetheless - not that she had taken the time to check the fallen guards’ pulses as she fled) path through the heavily armed men Director Abernathy always insisted to her were there to protect her but who she had known almost from the beginning were there to prevent her from escaping even before they proved it by standing firm between her and the exit, holding tasers and even pistols and rifles aimed steadily at her centre mass.

Just because she tried to avoid violence and causing harm did not mean she was not disturbingly capable of doing so.

The pieces of wood from the broken door were sharp - the proof of just how sharp written clearly in the spreading scarlet stain still leaking into her shoe from the long gash a piece of the front door had ripped into her calf. In the short time it took her racing heart to contract in half of a single beat, several shards rose from the floor, and before that one heartbeat reached completion they flew through the air in a smear of brown and tan motion too fast to track with the naked eye.

Jason could sense the electric charge of the air shift and his eye caught an indistinct blur from near his feet, but before even he had time to do more than tense his muscles in preparation for movement, a shock of pain burned up the dead nerves of his arms and seared through his shoulders into his chest less than an instant before he heard a loud thud that he could feel reverberate through his upper body. A low grunt hissed between his teeth, and he was surprised to discover that he could not move his arms. His shrouded head jerked from side to side, fury bubbling up over the pain at the sight of the large fragments of the shattered door impaling his shoulders and both his arms, the splintery wood stabbed between the bones of his forearms and deep into the plaster wall behind him, pinning him there like an insect on display.

Upon hearing the monster’s pained utterance, Tina stared in absolute horror at what she had just done - at the dark blood just beginning to seep out around the thick chunks of wood piercing through that decayed yet still somehow inhumanly strong body - and she felt ill. It did not matter to her shrieking conscience that Jason was a murderer who had killed her mother and her newfound friends, not to mention countless others, and who was currently hellbent upon adding her next to his long list of victims, or that she was not even certain if he was technically alive. It still horrified her to see such irrefutable proof that she could have done such a thing to _anyone_ , even to a creature of nightmare made flesh … and the fact that she was all too aware that he could feel pain, even if it seemed not to faze him or slow him down, that she had heard him grunt and could see him bleeding from grievous wounds that _she_ had inflicted, only made the sickening sensation of guilt washing over her like a tidal wave of self-recrimination that much worse.

Even worse, though, actually seeing him pinned to the wall like that, unable to reach any of the four shards of wood speared through him to rip them out, did almost nothing to alleviate her terror. All she could do was wonder how long it would take him to tear himself free - and how much angrier at her he would be when he succeeded. She stared, mesmerised, as he tested how securely the shards of wood held him pinned to the wall, blood flowing freely down his chest to soak into the ragged remnants of his shirt and dripping from his arms over his hands into a growing puddle upon the floor with each twitch of his muscles and jerk of his body.

Then it struck her.

_Tina, you idiot! What the hell are you waiting for? Now’s your chance to run for the door!_

Even as he struggled against the wooden spikes affixing him to the wall, trying to minimise the damage to his flesh, even though he knew that the deep wounds would heal far quicker than the much shallower gash in Tina’s leg, because he knew that he had to possess his full strength in order to kill her, he did not look away from her for an instant. He believed that he was learning to read her better, beginning to recognise the subtle movements and changes in her expression that foretold the use of her power against him. However, the expression upon her face as she watched him testing his bonds was … peculiar. It did not appear particularly determined or threatening, but beyond that he could not recognise what it might signify - and it never would have crossed his mind that she felt guilty, genuinely _sickened_ by what she had done to him.

But that careful observation served him well when he saw her lean forward ever so slightly, her weight subtly shifting to the balls of her feet as the muscles beneath her form-fitting jeans tensed for motion.

Tina had not made it past the first step in her attempt to run past him when Jason wrenched his left arm free from the shard of wood piercing through his forearm up close to his elbow and pinning it in place, heedless of the damage done when it tore through his flesh and scraped its full length along the bones between which it was tightly wedged in a shower of dark blood. Feeling several droplets of that thick, cool liquid spraying from the wound spatter against her face and cling to her hair, she shrieked in combined fear, disgust, frustration, and disappointment, and when his terrible hand, now rendered even more gruesome by the blood painting the pale bones that showed through the decayed remains of his flesh a garish crimson, reached for her, she almost fell in her haste to scramble backwards out of his reach.

Now that he had a hand free, he easily plucked out the wooden spear impaling his right shoulder and flung it at the blonde in the same fluid motion, his aim for her throat unerring despite the thick, sharp shard still pinning the shoulder of his free arm to the wall. Seeing the sharp, bloodstained projectile whizzing toward her, she fell back and landed heavily on the floor, even though ducking proved itself to have been unnecessary when her power swatted the piece of wood aside before it would have impaled her as it had Jason - only with far more dire consequences had it embedded itself in her. As Tina dug her heels into the worn floorboards, scuttling backward several paces away from the infuriated killer before she managed to pull herself back up off the floor, he ripped the splintery fragment of broken door out from between the bones of his right forearm. She watched in disbelief when he gripped the shard that punctured his left shoulder with his newly-freed right hand and pulled out the final piece of wood pinning him to the wall, shocked that he still could use that hand despite the through-and-through injury barely more than an inch above his wrist. It _must_ have hurt, she knew, and yet he seemed unfazed, almost completely unaffected by the torn skin, blood vessels, nerve fibres, and muscle that should have been crippling.

The blood that poured from the wounds that penetrated clean through Jason’s arms and shoulders stopped flowing almost immediately once the thick shards of wood no longer pierced his flesh; but, her stomach turned over in a flash of nausea, trying to empty itself when she realised that she could see hints of the wall and stairwell behind him _through_ the grotesque, baseball-sized holes they left behind.

Easily able to read the shock upon her pale face as she stood gaping at him and hoping that might mean that she was at least slightly distracted, that he might catch her off guard if she thought him badly injured, Jason rushed toward her without so much as pausing to collect himself. The open doorway from which the coat hangers had come flying at him was to his right when he saw her squint at him, and he suddenly felt an intense pressure around his neck that jerked him back, strangling him. He barely had time to realise that it was the chain around his neck pulling him backwards - away from his prey and toward the stairs - with invisible hands so strong that, despite how his boots pressed down hard against the floor for traction as he struggled to continue forward and his clawing hands trying to pry loose the chain digging into his throat, he could not even stand still much less continue his advance … when something large, thick, and dingy grey came hurtling through the doorway at him.

After seeing how quickly he recovered after being impaled by four thick wooden spears and pinned to the wall, and not knowing how else to prevent Jason from advancing upon her, cornering her against the far wall of the hallway, and eventually, inevitably killing her, in her desperation Tina reached out with fingers of pure energy to grab the old chain still encircling his thick neck and yanked him backwards. She hoped that it would be strong enough to pull him down the stairs and hold him at bay long enough for her to grab the car keys and make her escape, but to her dismay, he and his desire to reach her were so strong that she could feel the power struggling to drag him back barely a centimetre at a time. Then, inspiration struck, and a hint of a smirk curved her lips as she gestured with her chin. 

The dirty old twin-size mattress lying crooked across the bed frame in the smaller of the two bedrooms floated upward, twisting in the air so it could fit through the doorway as it gained velocity. Feeling the faintest hint of relief, Tina watched it emerge, turning as it hurtled toward the monster so that he could not sidestep it as he had the door, then slamming into him. She could see that he tried to dodge it - even though most of her view of him was obstructed by the mattress - but the chain held him in place, and all Jason could do was raise his arms in a futile attempt to bat it away. Between the chain around his neck yanking him back toward the staircase and the heavy old mattress that smashed into him with the force of a speeding automobile, he staggered back a pace then lost his footing entirely, flying backward down the stairs to land hard on his back at the base of the staircase. The back of his head struck the hardwood floor with a sickening crack as the sharp force of the impact with the floor over twelve feet below drove the air from his lungs, and before he could gasp for a breath, the mattress crashed down upon him, smothering him.

The moment the mattress slammed into him, Tina was in motion, not waiting to see him land. The knee she had torn out on the dock toward the end of her first encounter with the unkillable murderer and her injured calf screamed in protest as she raced down the stairs as quickly as they would allow her to run, desperately hoping to make it to the kitchen to grab the keys and then out the shattered remains of the front door before Jason had a chance to recover and regain his feet. He was still lying flat on his back, unmoving beneath the mildew- and water-stained mattress, when she reached the bottom step; then, without hesitating, she leapt over the corner of the mattress toward the kitchen. When she landed, she staggered as a bolt of pain shot up her leg - her weak knee, having taken too much abuse already that day, threatening to give out entirely - and she bit out a curse under her breath.

“Fucking hell!” she muttered, her voice strained.

But she did not stop, gritting her teeth against the pain as she forced herself to keep running. When her violently trembling hand closed around the keys ( _When did I start shaking so badly - and will it ever stop?_ ), a loud noise from the foyer startled her, and she whirled around, clutching the keyring to her heaving chest.

Feeling the horrible, strangling pressure around his throat suddenly vanish, Jason pushed the mattress off his chest, hurling it into the banister that cracked and splintered at the impact. Shaking his head to clear it while gasping for breath, the first thought that entered his mind was that in breaking the bannister he had just inadvertently created _more_ sharp objects the damned girl could fling at him (or that he could stab into her, he thought a mere instant later, somewhat mollified), and then he clambered to his feet. Even from beneath the mattress, he had been able to hear her footsteps ringing on the hardwood floor clearly as she ran for the kitchen, and he had been able to discern her misstep along with the muttered curse that followed close upon its heels.

_Good. I hope she’s injured - it’ll slow her down and make her that much easier to catch._

“And I hope it **hurts** ,” he added vengefully in his mind.

He turned slowly and looked through the open doorway into the kitchen, the sight of Tina standing there, so obviously terrified and shaking with her trembling fist pressed to her chest, bringing a terrible approximation of a smile to his disfigured face beneath its shroud.

With wide eyes, she watched the hulking figure arise with a terrible sort of grace unlikely in so large a man ( _But Jason’s_ not _a man - he might never even have been a man - he’s a beast, a walking corpse, a **monster**!_) and turn toward her, his single pale, green eye boring into her with such icy intensity that her heart stuttered in her chest. She felt the hard edge of the formica countertop digging painfully into her lower back, but she could not remember having backed up against it, and a low moan shivered out from deep in her throat when he took a step toward her. She had so many options - _too many options_ \- from which she could choose to use against him, to slow him down, but all she wanted to do was escape alive. She was just so tired, and her bad knee and torn calf were throbbing painfully in time with her heartbeat.

Unthinking, she murmured, “Please just stop … please let me go …”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she realised how utterly ridiculous it was trying to beg him for mercy. Truly, she already knew that before she spoke - she had known it since very early in their first encounter. There was no reasoning with him. And yet, the Camp Blood Killer halted, tilting his head to the side as he stared at her through the eyehole in the pillowcase covering his head with what looked to her like incredulity.

Jason stopped in his tracks, wondering if he had heard the girl correctly. _Was she actually begging him to stop?!_ He might have laughed at the sheer absurdity of it. Tina was not some idiot teenager newly come to Crystal Lake to party not believing the tales of the drowned boy who the lake had spat out to kill trespassers - she knew exactly what he was and what he did, _and she was the one who had dragged him out of the lake again_! If he were capable of speaking, she likely would have rendered him speechless. However, he actually deigned to reply, slowly shaking his head “no.”

The sight of the blood draining from her face as tears filled her crystalline blue eyes then slid down her pallid cheeks struck him as beautiful.

The sight of the monster actually responding to her pointless begging overwhelmed Tina with a new avalanche of despair, and it was through a burning glass of tears that she watched him resume his slow yet unhesitant approach. The gut-wrenching memory of finding Maddy - kind, gentle Maddy who had ignored Melissa’s cruel teasing and tried to be her friend - dead in the woods with her throat slashed open and her body nailed to a tree by the same monster, flashed before her eyes in vivid, oversaturated technicolour, and a dreadful, loud ripping sound came from the living room followed by a wooden clatter. 

Upon hearing the strange noise coming from the room behind him, Jason turned abruptly to see what new object might come flying at him, raising his bloodstained hands to fend off whatever it might be.

Although he had not known precisely _what_ Tina would fling at him next, he was not expecting to see a large section of the living room carpet come at him in a speeding blur so fast that he found himself securely enwrapped within its mould-stinking confines that completely enveloped his body from head to toe before he had a chance to dodge. His arms had still been raised to chest-height in order to fend off an attack when she trapped him in the carpet, so his bent elbows dug into his sides while his clenched fists were pressed into the deep wounds that penetrated his shoulders, causing them to bleed anew even though they already had begun to heal in the very short time after he ripped out the shards of broken door with which she had speared him. The carpet was bound so tightly around him that he could only manage the shallowest of breaths, each of which flooded his nostrils (such as they were) and mouth with the stench and flavour of rotting fabric and mould. Enraged, he began trying to struggle, to break free of his bonds, but he could barely move within the rank confines of thick, coarse shag that abraded every millimetre of his skin left exposed through the multitude of tears in his ragged clothes.

Awestruck, Tina watched in amazement as the nearly seven foot tall roll of nasty old carpet shook with Jason’s writhing struggles to escape, shocked at how effectively it appeared to restrain him even after she released the grasp of power holding it closed around him. Still, she worried that if he continued wriggling like that, he would soon be free, so she reached out with invisible fingers to tear the curtains down from the living room window, intending to tie them around the bundle to hold it secure until she could get away from him and Crystal Lake forever. However, nothing happened.

She sighed heavily, her shoulders slumping. It was only the second time that she had burned out her powers through overuse … but at least she had not fainted this time and it had not failed her before she had the monster restrained, she realised with a flash of relief.

_Oh well. Guess I’ll have to pull the curtains down and tie him up by hand. Could be way worse._

Trying not to think of what “way worse” might have entailed as she slowly limped past the bound killer, slipping the keys into the back pocket of her jeans to free up her hands, she could hear his sharp, shallow breaths punctuated with quiet grunts of effort and the rustling of his body through the thick, muffling material. She tried to ignore the sounds, knowing that it had been necessary, that he was trying to murder her, that he had already murdered so many people, but even that knowledge did not make her feel good about what she had done to him.

Fortunately, ripping down the curtains proved easier than she expected, although she was seized by a violent fit of coughing due to the thick cloud of dust that surrounded her when they fell. Still sneezing and coughing, her eyes watering, she tore the musty old fabric into long strips then carried them back into the foyer to tie them around the roll of carpet. The material was distressingly fragile, far too easy for her to tear, but she reminded herself that it did not need to hold forever.

_It just needs to hold long enough for me to get to the car and drive far away from this hellish place._

_Oh god, **why** did I ever come back here? I never should’ve come … I should’ve known better … _

_Ugh_! Up close, the carpet smelled truly awful, even worse than it had when she first walked upon it, and she hated to imagine how terrible it must be to be wrapped up _inside_ it. She thought he must have been able to hear her approach because the shuddering of the roll increased significantly when she got close. It sounded almost like he was wheezing in there, but she focused upon tying the lengths of fabric around the bundle, trying to remember the knots she had learned as a Girl Scout back before her family moved to Crystal Lake and her life fell apart, trying not to think about how it would feel (and smell) to be trapped inside of it.

Just when she finished tying the last knot that she hoped would hold the beast in his filthy cage of mould-filled carpet, the room seemed to spin crazily as a wave of dizziness crashed into her, and she sat down heavily on the floor with a muted thump. Exhaustion weighing her down, she closed her eyes tightly against the nauseating carousel of too-bright light and too-vivid colour in the dim foyer and waited for it to pass.

Hoped it would pass.

_Shit_. 

She knew what this was, recognised it from the past - a combination of physical exhaustion, stress, the draining effect of so much adrenaline and terror burning through her veins for so long, the strain of having overused her power until both she and it were burned out … and the only thing that would cure it was sleep. Or passing out, which she could not afford to do. Her body and mind were practically _screaming_ for rest, and if she did not stop, if she did not obey her body’s insistent imperative, then her body itself would stop her. And there would be nothing at all she could do about it. The prolonged dizzy spell served as an undeniable and unwelcome reminder thereof.

Drawing her legs up to her chest and wrapping her arms around her shins, she rested her forehead upon her knees, trying not to start sobbing. The feeling of the car keys in her back pocket digging into her bottom pulled her attention back to her goal ever since the monster still struggling to escape the prison of carpet in which she had bound him had come crashing through the doorway behind her. At that, a sob managed to escape her throat. The shuddering of the bound roll of carpet in front of her seemed to grow more agitated at the sound.

_She needed to get away - the roll of carpet tied up with rotting old curtains could not restrain a creature like Jason Voorhees forever - but how the hell was she going to drive away in this condition?_

Another voice inside her that she recognised as her conscience chided her none too gently, “And could you really just leave here, knowing _he’s_ free to start murdering innocent people again? Even if you didn’t reach into the lake intentionally this time, do you really think this isn’t your fault? Stop kidding yourself, Tina. You know the only reason _he’s_ back is because _you_ came back here. And now you want to run away and hide like a scared little bunny rabbit, even though you _know_ what Jason’s going to do to people if you don’t stop him … all the blood he’s going to spill, it’ll be on _your_ hands if you run away.”

She wanted to argue with her conscience, to tell it (and therefore herself) that she was not responsible for Jason’s reappearance and that she had no duty to try to stop him or at least restrain him more permanently than just leaving him wrapped up in filthy carpet like some grisly parody of Elizabeth Taylor in _Cleopatra_ … 

At that absolutely ludicrous thought - with its associated image of some tanned man in a pristine white toga trimmed with gold on an opulent, lushly decorated 1950s-1960s big-budget Hollywood historical period-piece movie set unrolling that dank, stinking length of disgusting old shag to reveal the terrible, grotesque monstrosity of decayed flesh and gleaming ivory bone hidden within - Tina started laughing rather hysterically. She strongly suspected that whatever sanity she might have retained after all of the horrors of her life had just shattered irreparably, but that was not enough to stop her uncontrollable giggles.

A louder grunt accompanied by such violent writhing from the carpet that she feared it might topple over distracted her from what she hoped was not her burgeoning outright insanity, and she wondered if her laughter had offended him.

Before she had a chance to think, she heard herself speaking.

“I’m sorry … I wasn’t laughing at you, really … it’s just - ”

Suddenly, she realised what she was doing, what she was saying.

_What the everloving_ **FUCK** _, Tina?! Did you just fucking_ **apologise** _to the monster who murdered your mother?!_

_Oh god, what was wrong with her?_

Despite how light-headed she felt, she absolutely _could not_ stay sitting there on the floor less than a yard from the horrid-smelling carpet with its significantly more horrid prisoner for a moment longer. She pulled herself to her feet, wincing at the twinge of pain when she put weight on her bad knee and the uncomfortable tugging sensation as the movement pulled her torn jeans away from the scab forming along her shin, but she tried to force it from her mind. She knew that she needed sleep or at least to rest for a while with her eyes closed and her body relaxed, so she attempted to ignore the dully throbbing pain in favour of concentrating upon figuring out what she needed to do in order to get that rest … preferably somewhat safely.

The obvious problem was Jason. She knew the carpet would not hold him back forever, and she feared it would not hold him back more than an hour or two, given the damage she had seen him willingly do to his own body so recently in his compulsion to reach her and kill her. Should he manage to free himself while she was asleep, she was certain he would kill her the moment he found her - and she was all too aware that knowing that would prevent her from relaxing enough to get any real rest. She could not seem to figure out a solution, and she was worried that she might have become too tired to think clearly, when inspiration finally struck.

She could build herself an alarm system of sorts to alert her if he moved too much or came close to freeing himself.

Smiling grimly, she limped passed the securely tied bundle and its undoubtedly furious prisoner toward the stairs, carefully avoiding the broken pieces of bannister as she began to climb up to fetch her supplies.

She only hoped it would work, and that she was not making a fatal miscalculation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the delay - knowing what Tina was going to do to poor Jason made this chapter difficult to write.
> 
> As for Tina’s guilt, the Cthulhtist is basing that upon her interpretation of the basement scene from The New Blood - Tina froze when Jason was staggering around in flames, and the expression upon her face looked absolutely horrified. Of corpse, one could argue that it was fear and that she was waiting to see him go down, but given her reaction to ripping Melissa’s pearls apart, and how many less lethal ways she tried to stop Jason before resorting to fire, it seems like she is extremely uncomfortable causing harm to anyone. Plus the massive guilt complex Dr. Crews was trying to exploit ...
> 
> Also, regarding why the Cthulhtist referred to the computer monitor in Tommy’s room as a television ... Jason was born in 1946 and he died in 1957, after which he has lived relatively thoroughly disconnected from modernity and civilisation. He might have some idea what a personal computer is, but as of the mid-1980s (back when floppy disks were floppy and the Cthulhtist was learning to use her parents’ Apple IIc)? HIGHLY unlikely. Therefore, he probably would have thought the monitor to be a strange sort of TV set sans rabbit ears. And, since that segment of the story is told from Jason’s perspective ... yeah. I’m sure y’all got it before I even explained, but just in case, I wanted to reassure that (in this case, at least) there IS a method to the Cthulhtist’s (undeniable) madness.
> 
> Hellfuck, I even alternate betwixt referring to myself in 1st and 3rd person in these notes. Should I start referring to myself in the 2nd person, though, c’est time to call in the nice men in white coats with their butterfly nets, n’est-ce pas?


	8. The Sound of Wind Chimes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All comments and criticism welcome!

Chapter VIII - The Sound of Wind Chimes 

  
  


It was hardly the first time that Jason had found himself restrained, trapped, unable to breathe; but this was different. When the Higgins girl managed to knock him senseless then wrap the rope tightly around his throat before shoving him out of the hayloft, hanging him, _breaking his neck_ and intending to leave him there to dangle with his boots several feet above the ground was one vividly memorable such occasion. What made that particular incident significantly worse was how much more “alive” he had been back then, his nerves less accustomed to pain, his body more easily injured. But with each wound inflicted upon his body by a victim desperately trying to survive his vengeance, his ability to shrug off physical damage, even injuries so severe they would have killed a “normal” man, increased. And then, he had been killed again, no less completely than when he drowned as a boy, this time by a brat who he had no interest in harming but who kept getting between him and his quarry, but he had been brought back from the grave again somehow, finding the same boy who had killed him, now a man, standing in his coffin. He had always been strong after the lake gave him back, but the strength he found himself possessing after his second resurrection had surprised him. By the time Tommy Jarvis slipped the chain wrapped about a large stone around his neck and sent him to the bottom of Crystal Lake, he had believed himself all but immune to pain and fear. However, as he found himself sinking inexorably down into the depths of the lake, trying to rip away the steel links that were simultaneously choking him and preventing him from escaping drowning _yet again_ , he had felt a tiny knot of panic tie up his dead entrails in knots when he realised that he could not get free. Still believing that he needed to breathe, he had struggled wildly against the chain even his incredible strength had been unable to break, and even as he held the young man underwater to force him to share in the dreadfully slow hell that is death by drowning, he felt himself giving in to true, profound panic such as he had not felt since his long ago childhood. As every movement forced water up into his nasal cavities and between his clenched teeth behind the mask, slowly filling his spasming lungs with water instead of oxygen, all he could think about was how horribly familiar it felt - the terrible, impossible struggle to reach the surface … the sheer weight of the water pressing in all around him, forcing its way into his mouth and sinuses … the awful sensation of his lungs begging for air but all they received was more and more water until they felt like they would explode within his chest … pressure, so much pressure - from the water that completely surrounded him greedily trying to fill his body and the water within him threatening to overflow and explode outward … and then the ripping agony of the propeller digging into his face, his throat, jarring his entire body as it tore at his flesh until his neck finally snapped under the assault and he sank into the blissful, grey oblivion of unconsciousness, so peaceful, so like death. By the time he regained awareness, the lake alone knowing how much time later, neither the Garris girl’s nor Jarvis’ bodies were anywhere to be seen (somehow, he _knew_ they had escaped, despite lacking any evidence of their survival) and his lungs had completely filled with water, no longer shrieking for the air the lake denied to them. Floating there, tethered to the stone on the lake bed by the thick, heavy steel links wrapped around his neck and barely able to move, the years passed by him almost unfelt, and all he had to keep himself occupied was his mind. 

His all-consuming thoughts of vengeance.

And then, so shortly after the little blonde girl awakened him from his dead dreams of revenge and freed him from the lake with that strange, terrible power contained within her delicate body, he had been dragged back down into the depths in chains,  _ again _ , forced to relive the paroxysms of agonising pain and fear of his first true death one more time.

Finding himself imprisoned within the tight, reeking confines of the foul roll of carpet, unable to move any part of his trapped body more than a millimetre or two, with his rib cage so compressed he could barely breathe the mould-thick air through the suddenly oppressive, mildewed pillowcase he wore to conceal his face … it was not terribly different from those other experiences. The impossibility of fully filling his lungs felt too much like trying to get in a breath of precious air while underwater, and for a horrible moment he was a child again, desperately clawing at water he could not grasp in the vain attempt to find the surface so he could just breathe in that sweetness just  _ one _ .  _ more _ .  _ time _ . He shuddered violently, his body spasming much as it had back then, strong muscles shaking even after the flash of memory faded and passed.

In other words, it was unspeakably, consummately awful.

His fists dug uncomfortably into the wounds the damned girl had pierced through his shoulders in her attempt to pin him to the wall so she could flee, causing them to bleed anew, and he could feel the thick, cool liquid slowly dripping down his chest, almost tickling the dead flesh over which it flowed.  _ How could he have allowed himself to get restrained  _ **_again_ ** ? That the vile carpet upon which he had walked might become a weapon wielded against him, a  _ cage  _ in which to imprison him, had not even crossed his mind, and he realised that he had, yet again, underestimated his prey and her drive to survive, to his own detriment. However, Jason was not one at all given to self-recrimination; instead, although he focused upon what mistakes he had made, he did so solely to figure out how he could avoid making them again.

Even while his body writhed within the roll of carpet, trying to loosen it enough to allow him sufficient range of motion to escape his foul, cramped prison, his calculating mind busied itself with analysing the mistakes he had made in his attack upon Tina, attempting to determine what he  _ should  _ have done so that he would not repeat them. As far as he could tell, his biggest mistakes were by taking his time in mounting the stairs in his hope that the extended anticipation would further unnerve her, and by not viewing  _ everything  _ in the house as a potential threat - up to and including the house itself. He would never forget how the entire roof over the porch had collapsed upon him, crashing down and burying him at a mere nod from the little blonde.

He needed to kill her  _ quickly -  _ as soon as he escaped his stinking, mould-ridden cage.

He could hear the light padding of her footsteps retreating, and he initially assumed that she was finally making her escape from Crystal Lake, and his struggles against his bonds increased in response to the thought that he could not allow her to leave again. Hunting down his mother’s murderer had been a singularly frustrating endeavour, both difficult and time consuming, although the feeling of the icepick piercing Alice’s skull as it slid deep into her brain had been a soothing balm upon his fractured soul, and he would prefer not to have to re-add Tina’s name to his list of victims who required tracking down before he could kill them, not when he finally had come so close to having her at his mercy again. Therefore, it was a relief of sorts when he heard her limping back toward him even though he had to wonder why she had not fled and what she was going to do next.

Suddenly, he could feel her pawing at the carpet in which she had encased him as she walked around it, and he was dismally certain that whatever she was doing, it would not make it easier for him to escape. His writhing within his bonds intensified to a near-frenzy, even though he knew that it was unlikely to discourage her from whatever it might be that she was doing, and the rough, mould-sticky shag rubbed, chafing uncomfortably against his flesh wherever it was exposed through the tattered remains of his clothing at even the slightest movement. However, physical discomfort had never been and would never be sufficient to stop him from doing whatever was necessary for him to achieve his goal, so he continued his struggling.

And then the damned girl had the audacity to  _ laugh _ at him. Fury such as he had not known himself capable of feeling blazed into an inferno within his cold corpse, and he grunted loudly (at least for him) at the effort of trying to squirm free so he could kill her  _ immediately  _ while digging his ragged, black nails into the shag in his rage.

All of a sudden, she stopped giggling and actually spoke to him. Apologising. Claiming that she was not laughing at him. 

Jason had no clue what to make of that, and although her laughter had offended him, reminding him of the incessant, cruel mockery to which his fellow children had subjected him on the few occasions when he had attempted to make friends prior to his drowning death at age eleven, it did not particularly matter to him if her apology were sincerely offered or not … but he hoped that it signified some weakness within her. He could not recall the last time someone had apologised to him, not that he typically paid much mind to the babbling of his victims during his observation of them prior to taking their lives. The only reason why he listened to them at all was as part of his analysis of the threat they potentially might pose to him and to learn how he might best manipulate them into terror and hopelessness to make fulfilling his murderous duty to the land the trespassers defiled merely by their presence as easy for him as possible. However, Tina’s laughter and her subsequent apology, regardless of how they were intended, would not assist him in his endeavour to escape the prison of rotten shag in which she held him, so he shoved the odd incident away to the back of his mind and resumed focusing entirely upon getting out.

**********

Upstairs, Tina knelt at the end of the hallway upon the bare, scuffed hardwood floor, sorting through the pieces of glass from the triangular window she had accidentally broken earlier that day when she lost control of her emotions and therefore of her psychokinetic power. Such incidents shook her, and despite the efforts she had made under the guidance of the researchers at the Institute, she despaired of ever developing the control she needed. Her psychokinesis was formed of her powerful emotions, just as Dr. Crews had explained to her, but the very power of the emotions she felt, particularly her guilt and loss, seemed beyond her ability to control. It felt like an ever-expanding system of perpetual motion - the more pain, horrors, loss, and fear she suffered, the more powerful her psychokinesis grew alongside her ability to shape it to her will … but the power itself frightened her, as did the incontrovertible evidence that she could not  _ always  _ control it, and using it always seemed to lead to her and others suffering more pain, more horrors … creating ever more loss and guilt that constantly threatened to overpower her in their increasing intensity.

She knew that many children dreamt of possessing so-called superpowers - the comic book industry existed mostly due to this desire - but if they only knew the all-encompassing terror and loneliness actually having them brought, she knew they would rethink that wish. Being able to manipulate objects with her mind was not fun or exciting. There was no thrill of accomplishment when she moved a matchbook across a table or ripped a solid steel door off its hinges with little more than a thought, only a sense of balancing upon a tightrope stretched across an awful abyss, knowing that the slightest misstep, the briefest moment of inattention could send her and others hurtling into the fathomless void. And all that awaited her there in the lightless depths, hungry and eager, impatient and  _ demanding _ , was Death.

Having supernatural abilities did not make her a superhero. It did not make her special. It just made her interesting to the sort of people who want to study, dissect, and control anything different or out of the ordinary, and to those who would want to use her, exploiting her power for their own gain. Despite how powerful she was and how easily she could destroy or even kill, it somehow left her vulnerable to being made into a lab rat, a guinea pig, or a pawn by those who would target her.

It made her miserable.

All Tina had ever wanted was an ordinary life, but she had been denied any of the trappings of normalcy after that fateful October day when her anger at her father for hitting her mother again in another drunken rage had erupted from her in a fatal form. She had spent the years from ages ten to seventeen in and out (but mostly in) mental institutions being consumed by her ever-hungry guilt, unable to attend school, unable to make friends, unable simply to be a teenage girl. And then Dr. Crews had come along, promising that a return to the site of her father’s death could provide a breakthrough, relieving her guilt and allowing her to return to the life stolen from her, providing her hope of a future where she could attend university, make friends, meet a boy … have a home, a career, a family …  _ a nice, ordinary life for a nice, ordinary girl _ . That was all she desired, and it did not seem unreasonable.

But Dr. Crews had lied to her and her mother about everything. He had not brought her back to Crystal Lake to help heal her of her crippling grief but to make her relive it, not to ease her pain but to intensify it so he could obtain irrefutable proof of her telekinetic power, to exploit it and her in pursuit of his own fame, prestige, and wealth. And from that lie had been born unspeakable pain, horror, and so much violent death … 

Very aware of how badly her hands were shaking, she handled the glass shards carefully as she picked up each piece one by one, turning them about between trembling fingers, scrutinising each one in her examination. Eventually, she settled upon twenty-nine medium-sized pieces of the broken window that she deemed suitable for her plan. Lifting up the hem of her shirt to form a pouch of sorts and feeling rather like a marsupial, she piled up the glass shards she planned to use in it then clambered unsteadily to her feet, planning to leave behind the rest of the glass just in case she might need to use it against the killer who waited in a cage of mouldering shag downstairs. Her head spun as a wave of dizziness engulfed her, and she leaned back against the wall, closing her eyes and trying to control her breathing.

“There’s a monster downstairs just waiting for me to screw up so he can kill me, and here I am, too exhausted to even see straight,” she thought with a miserable groan. 

In spite of the exhaustion weighing down her limbs, as soon as the dizziness passed she limped over to the closet in the larger of the two bedrooms and grabbed several coat hangers. The “alarm” system she planned to rig up on the roll of carpet containing the Camp Blood Killer was quite primitive, but she hoped it would work well enough to allow her a few hours of rest before she figured out how to restrain Jason for long enough - preferably forever - in order to assuage her guilty conscience so that she could leave Crystal Lake forever. At the moment, however, she was far too tired to come up with such a plan.

Once she made it downstairs with the main pieces for her alarm, she went back to the living room to gather some more scraps of the shredded lace curtains. Much to her relief, even though the windows were still closed and boarded up, the room already smelled noticeably better now that it no longer contained about half of the disgusting shag carpet that had completely covered the floor like some sort of foetid marsh grass. However, the foyer where that repurposed shag now stood as a cage now reeked of mould and decay. Laying down the components of her makeshift alarm system upon the bottom step of the staircase, she limped into the kitchen to see if the stink had spread.

_ Well shit. _

The rotten stench of mould had wafted into the newly-cleaned kitchen she had spent so much time sweeping and mopping, although it did not smell nearly as bad as the living room still did.

“So where am I gonna sleep?” she wondered. 

At first, she considered moving her sleeping bag upstairs to the smaller of the two bedrooms now that the mildewed mattress was downstairs and it had time to air out a bit, but she dismissed that idea almost as quickly as it came to her, because if she fell asleep up there, she was unlikely to hear anything if Jason managed to fight his way free until it was too late, even with the alarm in place, so the bedroom was out of the question. The living room still smelled far too terrible even to consider trying to sleep in there due to both the remaining carpet and the sagging, mildew-ridden couch. 

Sighing heavily, she muttered, “Guess I’m still stuck sleeping in the kitchen, after all.”

Her shoulders slumping in defeat and exhaustion, she returned to the foyer and sat down heavily upon the staircase to begin assembling the alarm system. Immediately, she realised that this was not the simple little crafts project she had anticipated it would be. Tying thin shreds of lace around the shards of glass so she could hang them from the coat hangers and have them make noise when striking each other proved significantly more difficult and time consuming than she anticipated, and being so close to Jason, even though she knew she had him securely restrained, was intensely unnerving.

Especially when she could hear his occasional grunts of effort as the roll of carpet heaved and shuddered with his unceasing struggles to escape its confines. Hearing any sound at all emanating from the killer aside from his breathing was such a rarity, at least in her experiences with him, that it was just as intimidating as his silence.

Once she managed to hang four pieces of broken glass from the first wire hanger, she held it up and jiggled it a bit, grinning at the chiming when the shards struck each other.

_ This just might work, after all! _

When she hung the hanger from one of the bands of lace curtain tied around the roll, she assumed Jason must have felt the slight movement because the shaking of his cage became significantly more violent, driving her to recoil involuntarily. However, much to her relief, she heard the jingly clanking of the first component of the alarm, so she proceeded to sit back down and started tying small scraps of old lace around the rest of the pieces of glass.

She must not have been paying enough attention to what her trembling hands were doing, perhaps distracted by either exhaustion or her close proximity to an unkillable mass murderer, because when she got to the second to last shard, it suddenly dropped from her grasp, accompanied by a loud exclamation.

“Shit! That hurt!”

Looking down at her hand, she saw that the last joints of her right index and middle fingers were bleeding from a long, shallow cut. With a pained hiss of aggravation, she shoved her bloodied fingers into her mouth, sucking on them to soothe the pain. And then she noticed that the carpet bundle and its horrifying occupant had gone still and silent, as if Jason had heard her outcry and was trying to listen for more. She glared at it darkly, biting back the urge to snap at him that she was fine and that she would be more than capable of handling him when he managed to escape.

Once she got some sleep, that is.

Upon removing her fingers from her mouth, she sighed, wishing she had thought to purchase some bandaids at some point during her long drive to New Jersey, but with no first aid supplies she simply resumed tying the last two pieces of glass to the final hanger. Picking up the hangers that jingled merrily, she gingerly approached the now almost-silent and unmoving roll of carpet and began affixing them to the lengths of fabric tied around it.

“Jason?” she murmured while setting her alarm system in place upon his cage. “I’ve hung a whole bunch of pieces of glass from the carpet, so if you move too much or try to get out of it, I’m going to hear it, and if I hear it I’m going to stab each and every one of them into you as deep as they can go, so could you please just stay still for a little while?”

Even though she knew that not only was her threat currently empty and unenforceable because she was too exhausted to use her power, but also that he would not - indeed, probably could not - reply, she waited for a moment in tense silence broken only by the muffled sound of his shallow breathing and her own heartbeat ringing in her ears. She was not even entirely certain why she had bothered trying to explain the situation to him. As far as she had ever been able to tell, all Jason cared about was killing absolutely everyone he encountered; and, right now, there was nobody else anywhere nearby to distract him from her - she was his only target. Why should he care if she could hear him coming for her? She knew that if he were to get free ( _ “it’s not if but rather  _ **when** _ he gets free, Tina - you know you can’t hold him back in a roll of carpet forever,”  _ her cruel inner voice corrected), he would come for her and come for her again, continuing to pursue her as long as he had to until he ended her life. And how much of a threat would such a man … no, a bestial  _ thing _ like him - a fiend who casually plucked out a roofing nail embedded deep in his forehead, who could shake off prolonged electrocution while standing in water, and who could rip large, sharp shards of wood impaling him and pinning him to the wall out of his flesh by hand - really find some pieces of broken glass? And then, much as she expected, the entire roll shook frenziedly, accompanied by the mad tinkling of glass.

Suspecting he could hear the alarm even through the thick layers of shag surrounding him and the pillowcase over his head, she muttered, “See? What’d I tell you? I can hear you if you move, so don’t try anything,” before limping back into the living room to fetch her sleeping bag and pillow.

_ How in the world had she wound up in such a position? _

Back in the kitchen, Tina laid out her sleeping bag upon the scuffed linoleum, intending to lie down immediately, but then a twinge of pain running up her lower leg reminded her that she was injured. And the wound upon her shin had not actually even been inflicted by Jason, although it absolutely was his fault she got hurt - the immediate cause of the gash in her leg was her own clumsiness as she tried to run away from him. Still, she would not have been running in a blind panic were she not being pursued by the fiend, so she gave him equal credit in causing her injury. 

Not wanting to get her “bed” all bloody, as she had no way of knowing how long she was going to be stuck using it rather than getting to sleep on a proper mattress (preferably on one not reeking of mildew, unlike the twin mattress leaning haphazardly like a drunk over the broken banister in the foyer), she pulled off her jeans, careful while easing them down past her torn flesh, then hopped up onto the kitchen counter to examine the gash in her shin from tripping over the broken front door. Her sharply indrawn breath hissed between her clenched teeth as she grimaced at how long and deep it looked.

“Shit,” she muttered again, then turned on the faucet and began rinsing off the wound in the sink. 

After the initial shock and sting, the cold water felt surprisingly good against her torn and abraded skin, but she was afraid to allow her fingers to scrub too close to the edges of the recently formed scab. Once it was clean, she turned off the water and sat there, staring at her lower leg. It crossed her mind that she probably ought to have checked inside the injury for splinters, but without any bandages to stop the bleeding, she really did not want to rip off the scab. At least the wound was clean now, and although the water had disturbed the scab, it was not bleeding badly. Glancing down at her jeans where they sat folded upon the worn Formica counter, she wished she had gauze or a bandage to wrap around it.

“Why didn’t I buy any first aid supplies once I decided to go hide out in the damned woods? It seems pretty obvious now that would’ve been a good idea. Am I really that much of a dummy?” she chided herself as she slid down to put her feet back on the floor then cautiously pulled on her jeans again, trying not to make the bleeding any worse and frustrated by how ill-prepared for her trip she was finding herself to be.

Then again, she figured that she must be suicidally stupid not to be in the stolen Toyota right now, putting as many miles as possible between herself and the murdering corpse trapped in the next room. The logical part of her mind agreed wholeheartedly.

_ What is  _ wrong _ with you, Tina? You didn’t pull it … him … Jason, or whatever you want to call him …  _ “ **it** ,”  _ dammit, everything you’ve gotta do is gonna be a whole lot easier on you if you just think of him as an it, a thing, inhuman,  _ not a person at all …  _ out of the lake this time. Don’t you think you’d remember doing something like that? _

She wanted to agree with that argument, desperately so, but her guilt piped up with an insidious smirk as she slowly lowered herself onto the sleeping bag, unwilling to crawl inside for fear of being trapped within it should the monster break free sooner than she anticipated he would, reminding her of her nightmarish memory-dream the previous night.

_ Quit deluding yourself. You know he hasn’t been out killing people after you got Daddy to drag him back into the lake - you  _ checked  _ before coming here, remember? So, what changed between yesterday and today, little girl, that might’ve brought him back? You know it, you  _ know  _ you do, so just admit it - and don’t you dare try to tell yourself it’s not your fault. _

Tina whimpered aloud, not wanting to think about it, but her guilt continued to torment her, hammering her with the facts in the harsh manner in which she could not bear to view them. The only thing she knew that had changed in the area surrounding Crystal Lake in the last day was her return. She had not freed him intentionally, but she knew that meant … 

_You didn’t_ mean _to free him that first time, either - you just wanted Daddy back even though he was an abusive drunk … and maybe it was you who drove him to drink, maybe dear Daddy had a sense of what his little girl was going to become and he couldn’t stand to face it, hmm? But, little dummy that you are, you had to go meddling with the dead, didn’t you, and you got a whole lot more than you bargained for._ **You** _freed him, and_ **you** _are responsible for everyone he killed that weekend. Can’t you_ feel _your mother’s blood staining your hands? Maddy’s? Michael’s, Russell’s, Kate’s, Robin’s, David’s, Eddie’s, Sandra’s, Ben’s? Others he killed that weekend who you never even knew … Even Dr. Crews’ and Melissa’s blood is_ all. on. you.

Pressing her hands to her ears to block out the harsh words even though she knew that the cruel voice she did not actually hear was just in her mind, Tina curled up in a ball on the sleeping bag, clutching her pillow to her chest and quietly weeping, unable to deny the truth that her guilty conscience spoke within her.

_ Oh, stop that snivelling. Your tears have never made anything better, as you well know. Haven’t you learned  _ anything? _ He’s back, and he’s going to kill so many more innocent people  _ **because of you** _ unless you stay here and put a permanent stop to him. You don’t really think there’s anyone else who can, do you? Even Nick shooting him and you setting him on fire and blowing up the house around him only slowed him down for a while - and it just seemed to piss him off even more. What more could the police or even the army do against him than that? _

She buried her face in the pillow so the killer in the foyer would not hear the loud sobs hacking their way out of her from deep in her chest. Tina did not know if Jason actually took any pleasure in his victims’ suffering, but in case he did, she wanted to deny him the sound of hers.

_ You’ve got to figure out how to stop him, once and for all, or else you’re gonna be responsible for  _ hundreds _ more deaths over the years. Maybe even  _ thousands.  _ All that blood, all that loss, all that pain and sorrow,  _ all because of  **YOU** …

Finally, the logical part of her mind interrupted her guilt’s tirade, although it said nothing to comfort the disconsolate, tormented young woman curled up in a ball upon a ratty sleeping bag atop the peeling linoleum floor in the kitchen of an abandoned cottage beside a cursed lake.

_ You can focus on how to stop him later, after you’ve gotten some rest. If you don’t relax and try to get at least a little sleep, there won’t be anything you  _ can  _ do to stop it, and it  _ will _ kill you. _

“Thanks,” she muttered rather grouchily to herself under her breath. “Reminding me he’s gonna kill me is really helping me relax. Stupid brain.”

She thought she felt her guilt giggle at her for that one, but she closed her dripping eyes tightly and tried to focus upon her breathing and the meditation techniques her “therapists” at the Institute taught her instead. Just thinking about the Institute caused a strange thought to poke itself into her mind. What if they came for her here - at Crystal Lake? She knew they were aware of Jason, both who he was and what he had done to so many people, but she suspected that a vast chasm lay between reading reports about the monster and actually  _ experiencing  _ his destructive power, his relentless drive to kill, and the horror surrounding him firsthand. She did not truly  _ want _ anyone to die, not even the men who she knew would find her eventually wherever she was hiding and come for her to take her back (“Keep telling yourself that you don’t want any of them dead,” her conscience tittered), but … she thought they might kind of deserve it. At least Director Abernathy, Dr. Ortiz, and Colonel Kramer certainly did. 

_ Probably _ . 

_ Maybe _ . 

“Okay, probably not,” she somewhat reluctantly admitted silently to herself. “Nobody deserves to encounter Jason.”

“Not even the people who drove Nick away and into the arms of some other girl who even looks kinda like you?” a sly, unwelcome yet familiar voice whispered inside her mind. “Not even the people who held you captive behind solid concrete walls and steel doors, under the watchful eyes of cameras and men armed with tasers, cattle prods, handguns, and rifles, stealing most of your life from you?”

“No! Not even them!” she retorted aloud into the pillow, but even to her own ears, her muffled words did not sound particularly convincing.

Hearing her protestations, her guilt cackled maniacally.

_ Keep telling yourself that, Tina - maybe someday you’ll even believe it. _

With a sigh and a quiet moan, she silently begged her mind to just shut up and let her rest.

But, with the sudden silence inside her head, she became all too aware of the incessant, persistent jingling of glass chimes from some five or six metres away in the foyer. Were it not so irregular (and if she were not so hyper-aware of the sound’s significance), the sound might have been soothing like the wind chimes it so resembled. But Tina did not find it soothing.

After perhaps five minutes of increasing agitation, Tina raised her head from the pillow, glaring at the shuddering roll of carpet.

“Dammit, would you  _ please _ just stop it? I’m trying to get some rest!”

Of course, the roll only shook more violently in response, the tinkling of glass growing more frenzied and therefore more irritating. 

“Do you really have to be such an asshole? It’s not like I  _ want  _ to hurt you or tie you up, but you don’t exactly give me any other choice,” she snapped, but of course it made no difference.

_ Why did I even bother?  _

With a defeated groan, Tina flopped back down onto the pillow, wrapping it around her head so she would not have to hear him while she tried to fall asleep, secure in the knowledge that it would fall loose and thereby restore her hearing as soon as her body relaxed. 

If her body relaxed.

“God, I hate you!” she spat.

She was certain that the feeling was mutual.

**********

Unable to move any part of his body more than a millimetre or two, Jason devoted himself mind and body to trying to get himself out of the disgusting roll of old shag carpet. He heard her climbing the stairs, and knowing that she remained so close and yet she was as unreachable as if she were across the country made him soundlessly scream in frustration. What was she doing up there? Why was she still here? The irksome questions about the irksome little witch of a girl taunted him as he flexed his muscles against the carpet, pressing outward with all his strength to try to give himself some more space to allow him to breathe, to escape, but to no avail.

Roughly grinding his teeth together until his jaw ached, he continued to struggle even as he dug his long, jagged, black fingernails into the thick, slightly crunchy shag, releasing a cloud of mould spores that burned his single functioning eye. However, it did serve to make him grateful that he wore the pillowcase rather than the far more comfortable hockey mask Tina had broken against his face however many years before, even though he felt like it was smothering him now, because at least the fabric served to filter what little air he was able to gasp into his lungs, preventing him from inhaling most of the mould into his nose and mouth. Not that it could have harmed him, as his long-dead corpse was no longer susceptible to the allergies and respiratory infections that had plagued him as a child, but to taste it would have made the unpleasant experience even worse. Scratching his way out through however many layers of carpet she had wrapped around him would be slow and tedious work, he had no doubt, but Jason was a patient man. It was far from his preferred manner of escape, but the tiny shreds of shag he could feel falling told him that it  _ would  _ be effective, given time. And since Tina seemed to be staying at the old cottage longer than was prudent, he possessed more time than he originally might have hoped in such circumstances.

When he heard her slowly limping back down the stairs - and hearing evidence that the little blonde was injured and moving slowly brought him a surge of something unfamiliar and not entirely unlike pleasure - he became aware of a faint tinkling noise that confused and concerned him.

_ What wasshe doing, and how might it impact him?  _

He could hear her uneven gait as she appeared to walk back and forth between the two main rooms on the ground floor, passing teasingly close to his prison, and he paused his heaving attempts to free himself to listen, trying to figure out what she was doing. When he finally heard her stop, so close that he could have reached out and grabbed her by her scrawny neck if only he could move his arms, he redoubled his efforts, clawing with his nails and pressing and rubbing his knees, elbows, and even his injured shoulders into the abrasive shag, careless of the pain in his  _ need _ to get out and get  _ her _ .

Although he had no idea what she was doing or what the clear, glasslike jangling sound might be, his distorted mouth twisted into the semblance of a smirk when he heard her curse and cry out in pain.

_ Another injury. Good. _

He stopped writhing and grinding his joints into the carpet to listen, hoping to hear more such exclamations; but, to his disappointment, all he heard after that was more of the strange jingling that oddly reminded him of the delicate glass wind chimes Mommy hung outside his bedroom window.

_ Whatever became of them? _

While lying in bed on nights when he could not sleep, he had enjoyed their sound coupled with the breeze rustling through the branches of the ancient oaks surrounding the small cottage where the camp owners had allowed them to live rent-free in return for his mother agreeing to cook for the camp during the summer and work at the diner they owned in town the rest of the year, but they were gone by the time he moved back into the cottage after that wretched girl, Alice Hardy, murdered Mommy right before his horrified, disbelieving eyes. And he had been paralysed, unable to move no less than he was now, unable to stop the girl, unable to save his mother. The ghost of that pain tore into his heart, as fresh and cruel as the night it happened, reminding him (not that he needed any such reminder) that he needed to kill Tina, just as he had killed Alice and all the others who desecrated Mommy’s grave by coming to Crystal Lake to do the irresponsible things they did, as if the ground upon which they trespassed were not sacred.

_ Maybe he could find those old chimes and hang them up outside his window again, once he dealt with Tina and those others who had escaped the punishment they so deserved and he could finally return home and rest …  _

The sensation of Tina’s hands poking at the carpet in which she had imprisoned him and the muffled tinkling sounds seeming so close startled him from his reverie, but he chose to listen rather than to resume trying to force himself out of his cage of filthy shag. Suddenly and much to his surprise, she addressed him again, explaining that she had fashioned chimes to alert her if he moved too much or managed to escape - and then she threatened to skewer him with the pieces of glass if he tried. He almost laughed. After everything she had done to him, did the little fool really think the threat of being stabbed with some pieces of glass would intimidate him? And why had she warned him? This whole situation was perplexing and unnerving, and he hated it.

Further angered by his confusion about what she intended, he resumed struggling against his bonds, simultaneously trying to shred and burst the roll of shag confining him and preventing him from killing the infuriating little witch, accompanied by the mad jangling of the glass with which she had bedecked his prison. Then, she had the gall to point out the ringing of the chimes, which he heard as her smugly mocking him and the predicament in which she had placed him. With a silent snarl of pure rage, he jerked his body as violently as he could within the impossibly tight confines to demonstrate just how little he thought of her efforts.

Even after she limped away, he continued vigorously fighting the carpet as he tried to listen to her. While his hearing was particularly acute, the strongest of his heightened predator’s senses, he could scarcely discern the sounds Tina made as she moved around over the chiming of the glass shards she had hung from the carpet to serve as a sort of alarm system. Had it been any other victim and were he not trapped in the uncomfortable cage she had made, he might have been grudgingly impressed by her ingenuity; but, as it was, it only served to irritate and enrage him further. Most of all, he tried to keep his mind focused upon finding any weakness in his prison that he could exploit so he could escape - but in part, he was trying  _ not  _ to think about why she had not gotten into her car and driven away as soon as she had him so thoroughly restrained. He was well aware that her reason was unlikely to benefit him - not that he feared her or it, but he was already so frustrated with how she continued to thwart his attempts to kill her that considering how she might make it even more difficult to fulfill his duty was just about as unpleasant as his current intensely uncomfortable position.

He heard her footsteps retreat into the kitchen, and then the sound of running water, which he did not find particularly interesting. However, once she turned off the water, he could hear her muttering to herself, and although he could not catch every word she said, he did hear her say that she was “hiding out” here at Crystal Lake, which piqued his curiosity. Hiding from whom? In order to hear her better over the incessant chiming and through the thick carpet surrounding him, he ceased using his whole body to try to escape, although he never stopped clawing at the shag. However, she said nothing more about the circumstances that had brought her back to the land he guarded much less why she had chosen to bring  _ him _ back … but he did agree with her assessment that she was “a dummy” for doing so, despite his loathing for that term, one of the many with which the other children had taunted and derided him in his youth.

Whatever else she might have said was too quiet for him to overhear, although he thought he heard her whimpering again like a kicked puppy.

_ How can something so weak and pathetic be so difficult to kill or possess such a terrible, destructive power? _

Just having to listen to her snivelling disgusted him, and knowing that she had managed not only to evade him but to trap him so ignominiously made it even worse. Not wanting to hear her crying, he strained fiercely against the cage of shag, pleased when his nails finally managed to tear a small hole through the second layer of carpet surrounding him. He had to get out and kill her. 

When she yelled “Dammit, would you  _ please _ just stop it? I’m trying to get some rest!” from the other room, Jason came close to laughing again, and shook the carpet roll with all the strength he possessed.

_ So that’s why she strung me up with chimes - the foolish girl’s trying to sleep and doesn’t want me to catch her in so helpless a state. _

He wondered if he would be able to break his rule of not killing the unconscious if he found Tina in such a position again. The first time she freed him from the lake, he had ignored her passed out body where she sprawled upon the pier after witnessing him arise from the depths, a decision he quickly came to regret and regretted to this day. But what was he, without his rules? He did not even know if he had made them up himself or if the forces that had resurrected him after he drowned and that continued to imbue him with “life” had imposed them upon him, as these were not the sorts of things he pondered when not busy fulfilling his purpose by hunting and killing trespassers. Either way, though, the rules were important, and he could not break them without suffering consequences. Even though he never thought too deeply about the powers that brought him back from death and compelled him to kill, he suspected that Tommy Jarvis had been able to kill him - truly kill him - as a child because he had broken his rule against harming children when the pesky brat got between him and the sister - the girl having been his only target at that time - too many times. Whatever the risk, it might be worth it to catch Tina unawares like that and kill her when she could not fight back.

Still, knowing why she had created an alarm system to alert her to his movements did not explain why she was still here. Jason was not fond of mysteries or conundrums, preferring his simple, orderly life of protecting the forest where Camp Crystal Lake once flourished by murdering all unwelcome intruders to have as few difficult questions as possible, so not knowing bothered him. And being bothered just made him angry.

Apparently he was making her angry, too, though, because the next thing she yelled at him was, “Do you really have to be such an asshole? It’s not like I  _ want  _ to hurt you or tie you up, but you don’t exactly give me any other choice!”

As Tina was hardly the first person to call him an asshole, he no longer found that word particularly personally offensive, and he did not care if she did not want to hurt him or restrain him - she had done so, and regardless of what she wanted,  _ he _ wanted to hurt her,  _ needed  _ to kill her. And of course she hated him.

The feeling was, indeed, mutual.


	9. Chapter IX

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments, questions, and criticism (constructive or otherwise) are more than welcome!

**Bound by Rusted Chains**

  
**Chapter IX**

The report of a powder-blue 1987 Toyota Camry stolen from the parking lot of the Texaco filling station a block away from the Waffle House where the nurse’s Volvo had been found came as a relief to Jay Abernathy. He just wished that the owner had not waited two days before he finally decided to report the theft. “ _ Not that wishing has any ability to change the past _ ,” he thought with a mordant grimace that twisted his blandly attractive face into something far less sightly for a passing spectre of a moment.

Initially, Abernathy had suspected that the vehicle’s owner might have been involved somehow, that Tina Shepard probably had manipulated the recently divorced man into “lending” her his car and refusing to tell anyone of his part in her scheme. She was a pretty little thing, no doubt, with those big blue eyes and long blonde hair - soft spoken and harmless looking, the type of woman who naturally evoked sympathy in a certain sort of man. If she could have lulled his staff into complacency even though they knew full well what she was and what she could do, which he had discovered during the interviews that she -  _ so damned obviously, in retrospect _ \- had accomplished prior to her escape, he was certain that she could affect a stranger who knew nothing of the power within her or what she was capable of doing to innocent people therewith even more effectively and with little conscious effort upon her part.

In other words, he knew that Shepard could have convinced a man, even a complete stranger, to loan her his vehicle and to not tell anyone about her or what he had done for her. It was only when she failed to return it after a reasonable amount of time that her mark would have recognised her manipulation and reported the car as stolen to the authorities. Further, Abernathy had assumed that the owner of the old Camry probably had been embarrassed to report the theft, as well, because of how easily he had been duped by her. Nobody likes to admit that they were a sucker, a victim of deception and manipulation, and the sort of man who would fall for Shepard’s tricks also was likely to be of the sort who would retain his hope that she simply had been delayed in returning his car to him for some legitimate reason and that she would come back with it “any minute now.” That this scenario would be almost exactly what had occurred in the gas station parking lot and for two days thereafter made perfect sense to Abernathy, and it was this story or some variation thereupon that he expected to be told by the men who had interviewed the Camry’s owner. 

However, despite the high likelihood that his initial assumptions regarding what had transpired outside the Texaco station were the reality of what had happened, he also knew just how thorough his operatives were when conducting interrogations. Therefore, if they believed the man’s explanation that he had thought for two days that it was his ex-wife as opposed to a stranger who had taken the old Toyota sedan without his permission or knowledge, and that this was why he had waited so long to report the theft, then the Director had no reason not to trust the veracity of their report. They would have gotten the full story out of the man, and they would have made certain that it was the truth. It was as simple as that.

Once he got off the phone with Agent Beahm who had headed up the interrogation of the owner of the stolen Camry and who had relayed the results thereof, Abernathy felt compelled to reassess his impression of Shepard. He had assumed that she would use her youthful, innocent appearance to get what she needed rather than resorting to theft. After all, the likelihood of being caught by someone while committing a crime like stealing a car was very high, and yet from everything that he knew of her, she tended to be very risk-averse.  _ So, what did it mean that she had stolen a second car as opposed to attempting less conspicuous methods of obtaining transportation? Had the choice been driven by her shyness or by something else? Could she have antisocial tendencies that the psychiatrists and psychologists who interviewed her had failed to discover? If she could have hidden that from so many professionals for so many years  _ … 

There was a part of him, albeit a small one, that felt surprised by the fact that they were following a series of stolen cars as opposed to a trail of dead bodies to the target’s location.  _ The owner of the Toyota was fortunate that he had not tried to stop Shepard from taking his car _ , Abernathy thought, having abandoned his prior impression of her passivity and aversion to violence after the destruction which he had seen her leave behind in his facility.

_ But where had Shepard gone in the seventeen-year-old sedan?  _

The Texaco station had video cameras, and they had captured the stolen Camry leaving the parking lot and turning onto a service road that fed into Interstate 80 East. It was a decent clue to follow, but it did not preclude his quarry from exiting at any point and going either North or South upon another road, or even from turning around and backtracking. She was proving herself to be far more cunning than he originally had surmised, so there was little that he would not put past her at this point. At least he knew the capacity of her fuel tank and the vehicle’s efficiency once more, so he knew approximately how far she could travel without having to refuel.  _ Just under sixteen gallons and a maximum of about 500 miles to a tank. _

Knowing how cautious Shepard was, too, he doubted that she would allow the tank to reach ¼ to empty while travelling upon unfamiliar highways, despite how little money she had with her. So, she probably would not exceed 350 miles before stopping at a filling station, he decided. He hoped to receive another report of a sighting of her very soon - preferably a very recent one.

In the five days since her escape, Abernathy had read every single word upon every single page of her file, including the charred remains of that pompous, venal, narcissistic fool Christopher Crews’ notes that they had managed to recover from the smouldering ruins of the Shepard home beside Crystal Lake. Nothing in the file indicated that she had any interest, much less expertise, in automobiles, so he suspected that her choice of such a reliable (albeit old) vehicle, and one which had been well-maintained, at least under the hood, was nothing but good luck for the escapee.

It was just more bad luck for him, of course.

He felt quite certain at this point that he had read everything ever written about Shepard. He had discussed her in person with the psychiatrists and research scientists who dealt with her most in-depth at the Institute. He had spoken with the nurses tasked with her day to day care, including two more interviews of the critically injured nurse, Larry Miller, who was yet to be released from the intensive care unit upon the hospital floor of the facility. He felt that he knew Shepard better than he would have known his own daughter, had he ever had the time or inclination to have children of his own. Even so, knowing that her favourite colour was baby pink, that she was shy and quiet, prone to crying yet possessed of a violent temper when pushed too far, that her extraordinary power manifested when she was under extreme stress or otherwise emotionally overwrought, and that her sense of guilt and responsibility had been honed by the catastrophe and death that had marked her life to a razor’s biting edge, did little to inform him of where she might have headed.

Or what she might do if she felt cornered.

Despite the dangerous power that she possessed, Abernathy had been shocked by the deadly violence of his subject’s escape. He had believed her to be passive and tractable, avoidant of conflict and abhorring violence, just as everyone who knew her, from Dr. Crews to his own hand-picked experts, had declared her to be.  _ Hell, she had never even complained about being kept at the Institute and subjected to their training, examination, and testing.  _ He did not even know why she had left. Assuming that his operatives were able to bring her back to the Institute alive, he would have to pry the answer to that question out of her. Perhaps it was something which easily could be rectified. If not, then he would have to increase security, probably exponentially. The expense thereof was of no concern to him, as he knew with absolute certainty that those powers that funded the Institute would pay whatever price to keep the studies of her afloat, but the practical reality of what measures might be required to keep Shepard contained against her will most certainly was.

_ And if steel doors, concrete walls, armed guards, and the daily heavy doses of medications could not hold her, what could? _

Had Abernathy been an even remotely religious man, that question would have driven him to pray that she would return to the Institute and decide to stay of her own free will. Anything else would be a logistical nightmare, at best, and the cause of a massacre, at worst.

Making sense of Shepard’s escape was proving difficult for him. According to the notes taken by the Institute’s head of psychiatry, Dr. Rigo Ortiz, she actually had  _ thanked  _ them for keeping her apart from society because she said that she feared her psychokinesis and what she might accidentally do to someone if she lost control. There were no reports of complaints by her about how she was treated or requests for privileges that had been denied. Simply put, nothing that he read about Tina Shepard had indicated that she would flee the Institute much less that she would have been willing to kill in order to do so.

Abernathy considered it a shame that she had escaped the facility as she had, particularly when, thus far, he had been unable to determine any reason for her to have done so. Shepard was an invaluable subject, intelligent, articulate, and above all,  _ powerful _ . Because of this, there was little that he would not have been willing to do for her to keep her content within the facility - if only she had asked. They had learnt a great deal from and about her during her time at the Institute, and there were several other agencies interested in both her and in their discoveries about her psychokinesis.  _ If her power could be replicated, particularly in a more stable subject …  _

But mental stability did not appear to be a trait that the subjects of his studies often possessed, and this disturbing characteristic was not limited to those with psychic abilities in his experience.

It would be even more of a shame if she refused to return and his operatives were forced to terminate her. He doubted that the Institute would ever find another being like her to study, at least not during his lifetime, and they had sunk countless man hours and millions of dollars into her during the time that she had spent at the facility. However, she simply was too dangerous to be allowed to roam free, as she had proven beyond any doubt (not that he had retained any such doubts after seeing the site of the house she had blown up during the last Crystal Lake massacre seven years before with his own eyes) only five days earlier.

The notification trace that he had ordered to be placed upon the nurse’s credit cards had yielded nothing thus far. Not that he was terribly surprised by this - he knew that the subject was both intelligent and clever, two very different and not always interconnected qualities in his experience. Even with her psychokinesis, the fact that she had survived the last Crystal Lake Massacre spoke both to her ability to think quickly upon her feet and to her resourcefulness. If not for the report of the stolen vehicle, she would have been a ghost. He appreciated her intelligence and considered it to be an asset for their studies as it allowed her to provide clear answers to their questions and explain things that otherwise would have been limited to conjecture. Her cleverness, on the other hand, was a large part of what made her so dangerous in his mind. 

However, the inability to trace her movements more easily had driven him to do something which he had hoped to avoid: alerting law enforcement to Shepard’s escape. Of course, he had not included any information about what the woman actually  _ was _ , only that a mental patient named Tina Shepard, a blue-eyed blonde standing 5’6” tall and weighing 103 pounds, had escaped a secure facility in Nebraska after killing two guards, that she was to be considered armed and dangerous despite her appearance, and that she was  _ not  _ to be approached. Fortunately, they took monthly photographs of their prize research subject, so he had been able to provide the law enforcement offices with a very recent, very accurate image of her, and e-mail made disseminating the photographs far simpler than it would have been even a decade earlier. Even so, he knew that the nationwide alert would put anyone who saw her and disregarded that final warning in danger. All that he could do was hope that any civilian witnesses would follow the directive to alert local law enforcement, who he trusted only slightly more than the general public to do as they were told and contact him upon his private number while maintaining covert surveillance rather than engage the subject. 

As if summoned by his thoughts, the phone in his office rang, its shrill tone snapping Abernathy out of his contemplation of where the woman might have gone and how she might be found and apprehended. The caller ID screen indicated that it was an unavailable or blocked number from Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Glancing up at the map of the continental United States upon his wall, he noted that Interstate 80 went through the town. 

“ _ This could be the break I was waiting for, _ ” he thought, trying not to get his hopes up too high in case it was a false alarm or possibly even something completely unrelated to Shepard. After all, she was far from the sole focus of the Institute, just the most valuable and the one upon whom almost the entirety of his attention was focused at the moment.

Lifting the phone from its base, he spoke in a clipped, professional tone.

“Abernathy. How can I help you?”

“This is Detective Sergeant Marcus Adams of the Hazleton City Police Department, calling in response to the BOLO issued by your … agency? Regarding the Shepard woman.”

Adrenaline flooded his system upon hearing the detective’s words. Abernathy could hear the awkward hesitation in the man’s voice, seeming to denote some uncertainty regarding the nature of the organisation which had put out the report about Shepard’s escape, but it did not faze the Director in the least. The Institute’s very existence was not widely known, as it dealt in secrets that would send the public into outright panic if they had any idea what really was out there - the truths that had to be kept hidden away under lock and key behind concrete walls in order to allow ordinary people to go about their daily lives, blissfully unaware of what walks among them. Shepard was only one of many such improbable things that they had discovered and studied during his tenure, and she also was the most powerful. He knew, all too well, that they had only just barely scratched the surface of what she was capable of doing, and even what they had discovered thus far went exponentially above the capabilities of any of the other subjects they had studied. It was before his time at the Institute, but he was only aware of one other psychokinetic whose power was similar in intensity to Shepard’s, and the White girl had perished back in 1979 in a massive fire at a high school dance before the men tasked with bringing her in for study had been able to extricate her from the grasp of her insanely religious mother (who, it later was determined by operatives, had been killed by White herself shortly before the teenager’s regrettable but perhaps unavoidable death).

However, now was not the time to ponder Shepard’s extraordinary abilities or the rôle that the Institute played in studying and containing such beings. He needed to focus upon finding out what had led the detective to call him.

“Yes?” Abernathy inquired mildly, even though he wanted to  _ demand _ every scrap of information that the Hazleton police department might possess regarding the escapee, immediately. 

Clearing his throat, Adams explained, “We have a video-confirmed sighting of a woman who matches Shepard’s description in a matching Toyota Camry at an Exxon station just off I-80 on the east side of town. I can fax you a still of her face taken from the store’s cameras for confirmation.”

“Yes, do that,” Abernathy snapped, his scant patience worn thin. “Did they see what direction she drove off in?”

The Director heard muffled voices, as if the detective had turned away from the phone to deliver an order to a subordinate, and then Adams addressed him again.

“Yes, Sir. The clerk noted the vehicle turning out of the station in the direction of the I-80 East on-ramp.”

Collapsing back into his chair, Abernathy barely managed to suppress a sigh of relief.  _ The target was still heading east toward the Atlantic, toward her home state of New Jersey. _

“Did she say anything to the clerk?”

“Not a word,” Adams replied. “She paid cash for ten gallons and bought a few packs of peanut butter crackers then left. He said he wouldn’t have thought anything of it if not for catching the news reports of an escaped mental patient.”

Despite her shyness, he did not believe for a moment that the subject had not said anything to the clerk. However, pleased to hear how his reluctant plan to inform the authorities of Shepard’s escape was working out, Abernathy asked the second-most important question.

“How long ago was she seen at the station?”

He heard another very brief hesitation before the detective replied, slightly apologetically, “Well over a day ago. The clerk said he didn’t realise who he’d seen until he got home at the end of his shift and saw a picture of the woman on the news, and even then he didn’t believe it until he went back to work and reviewed the security camera footage with his boss.”

Abernathy’s jaw clenched and his teeth ground together.  _ Shit! She could easily be in New Jersey, north past New York, or even further south than Virginia by now, depending on how long she’s stopped to eat and rest. If she hasn’t decided to backtrack. Shit! _

The beeping and whir of the fax machine beside his desk momentarily drew the Director’s attention away from his vexation and the man upon the phone. Almost hungrily, he watched the image appear line by line, and as it formed into a face his thin lips twisted into a genuine smile for the first time in days. There was no doubt that the woman depicted in the grainy, black and white image was Tina Shepard. If not for the unpleasant revelation that more than a day had passed since this latest sighting, he might have felt a flood of relief at the appearance of that familiar face.

Instead, he felt only frustration.

Abernathy’s tone was cold and flatly professional when he spoke again. “Thank you very much for calling, Detective Sergeant Adams. That is Shepard. Just remember that, despite her size and appearance, she is a very dangerous sociopath in the midst of a psychotic break, and she was responsible for the deaths of two highly-trained armed guards at the facility from which she escaped. I’ll be sending out a specialised team to apprehend her, and I strongly recommend against approaching the subject if she is still in your area.”

He was certain that he could hear the confusion in Adams’ voice when the detective replied, “Copy that, Sir.”

“Someone from my office will be in Hazleton shortly to meet with your department and determine how to proceed with locating and apprehending her.”

His mind already flying through possibilities, Abernathy barely heard Adams’s confirmation that they were expecting the operative and would cooperate fully. Pressing down upon the receiver to disconnect the call from Pennsylvania without saying anything more to the Hazleton City Police detective, the Director’s fingers automatically dialled a familiar extension. As soon as the ringing upon the line stopped, before the person who answered could identify himself or herself, he barked, “Confirmed sighting of target in Hazleton, PA, approximately one day ago. Seen continuing eastbound on I-80 in the direction of Stroudsburg.”

“Roger that, Director. We can be there in an hour.”

The woman’s voice that answered the call was vaguely familiar to him, but he could not put a face to it, and he had no interest in wasting critically valuable time by asking her to supply her credentials. Whichever of his operatives had been the one who answered the call, he had faith in their ability to pass along and effect his orders. Then again, he used to have faith in the facility’s ability to keep the subject at issue within the confines of the Institute property where she belonged, and yet solid steel doors, concrete walls, and what he had believed to be a more than sufficient number of well-trained and well-armed guards had not been able to contain her.

Closing his eyes, Abernathy rubbed his temples with soft, manicured fingertips, wincing at how long his close-cropped hair had grown since he last had it cut. But now was not the time to make an appointment with the barber. His earlier migraine had subsided somewhat in the days since Shepard escaped, but knowing that it would be another hour before he had men on the ground interrogating the witness or witnesses in Hazleton did nothing to alleviate the pressure behind his right eye or the visible aura surrounding everything in his scantily decorated, spartan office. 

_ Another hour. Another seventy or more miles she potentially could put between herself and her pursuers before they even reached the site of her last known whereabouts. _ It was too long for him to wait. Already, far too much time had passed since the clerk at the filling station interacted with Shepard, and far too much time had passed between that interaction and the clerk reporting it to the police, before it was reported to him. They were closing in upon Shepard,  _ but not fast enough. _

“Try to cut that in half,” he snapped irritably at the woman on the other end of the call over the renewed pounding in his head. It felt almost as if his right eye would pop out of its socket, the pressure within his skull was becoming so intense. “Find out everything you can about the witness or witnesses from the local LEOs, interrogate them, and then _find_ _her_. Something like Shepard cannot be allowed to be around the general public - actual human beings - unsupervised. She poses too great a threat to the public safety.”

“Got it,” the nameless operative quickly replied, the pitch of her voice grinding like coarse-grain sandpaper into the Director’s skull. “We’re on our way there now. Vogel, over and out.”

Without another word, Abernathy slammed the phone back onto its cradle, instantly regretting the force he had used to hang up when the noise reverberated and echoed for several long, nauseating seconds in his ears. Although he was not even close to satisfied by the newest development, and he would not be until the threat was neutralised, either taken back into custody or terminated, he was pleased to know that at least they were closing in upon Shepard. Sinking down into the cool, plush embrace of his black, Corinthian leather-upholstered chair, he gazed up at the map adorning his wall. In a few minutes, he would get up and add a new red flag to it upon the point where Interstate 80 East passes through Hazleton, but for now he needed to sit.

Looking at and analysing the route which she had taken, he became increasingly convinced that Shepard was heading home. Although there was nothing and nobody there for her any longer, he supposed that it made sense that she would go somewhere familiar. To him, this meant that, if he were correct, she would be going to Passaic where she had grown up both before and after the family’s abortive move to the small town of Forest Green upon the edge of Crystal Lake when she was ten. After a few more seconds of contemplation, he decided that it was likely that she was similarly familiar with the town of Wyckoff, as she had spent a significant amount of time at the in-patient psychiatric hospital located there prior to returning with her mother and Dr. Crews to the place where she had killed her father. That trip had been presented to the Shepards ostensibly as therapy, but he knew that Crews had brought her back there so that he could gather and record indisputable proof of Tina’s psychokinesis so as to achieve fame and fortune for himself and to advance his own career. Actually providing the girl with therapeutic services for her fractured, guilt-ridden mind had been even less important to Crews than it was to Abernathy himself.

In truth, though, Abernathy had to accept that about the only place where the subject was unlikely to go was to Wessex County. That she had gone on a hunger strike at the mere suggestion that she should return to where so many people had died cemented in his mind that she would avoid Crystal Lake at all costs. Still, it did appear to him that Tina was driving to New Jersey. 

Crystal Lake had been a sore point for the Director for years now. There was a part of him that wished that they had been able to recover the infamous Camp Blood Killer, Jason Voorhees, along with Shepard, after the massacre that June weekend seven years ago. The thought of getting to study such a being as that, a man who had been declared officially dead three times since 1957 by the authorities yet who kept coming back from death to kill, was enticing, to say the least. And, based upon Shepard’s vivid description of the one-eyed, obviously decayed creature that had killed her mother, Crews, and so many others, Abernathy had little doubt that Voorhees was indeed something that had died, again and again, as opposed to a series of copycats as the local police had insisted so many times that he nearly had their speech upon the subject of the murders memorised. 

_ What a fascinating subject Voorhees would be!  _

Given the chaos and death that the young woman who had survived that weekend had wrought in her escape from the Institute, though, he doubted that they could have held Voorhees in a facility with any more success. Shepard had a conscience and felt acute guilt for the deaths for which she held herself responsible. On the other hand, if the stories about Voorhees were true, it lacked those characteristics of humanity and was nothing more than a mindless killing machine, incapable of feeling remorse for the murders it committed. Still, Abernathy thought that it was a shame that they had not found its body amidst the carnage. Psychokinetics were rare, and ones who possessed the degree of power Shepard did were the rarest of that incredibly rare breed, but the undead? In all his years overseeing studies of the paranormal at the Institute, Abernathy had never encountered that sort of creature.  _ Could it be reasoned with? Did it retain any humanoid intelligence, or did it function upon base instinct alone? Why did it kill? How much damage could such a thing take before dying once again? How long would it remain dead before undergoing another resurrection? What factors had to be present to bring it back to “life”? And what would stop it? Bodily dismemberment? Beheading? Complete physical obliteration? Would even reducing it to irradiated atoms be sufficient to destroy it forever? And, perhaps most importantly,  _ could it be replicated ?

The military applications for a nigh-unkillable being, one which was programmed to obey its commanding officers without question or concern for its safety or bodily integrity, were too numerous to count.

Voorhees was a fascinating subject, to be sure, but one which he doubted that he ever would have an opportunity to explore. Much to his irritation, even under hypnosis, Shepard had refused to divulge what had become of its body, merely repeating the line, “we took care of it,” over and over. He had never even been able to discover who the “we” to whom she referred was. The only other known survivor, Nicholas Rogers, had been confirmed beyond any doubt to have no knowledge or memory of either how he had survived or where the murderous creature’s body might be.

About forty-five minutes after he had placed the latest flag in the map to indicate where Shepard last had been spotted, his phone rang again. The completely blocked number indicated to him that it was likely to be one of his operatives upon the other end, so he snatched the phone up off the cradle and answered before the second ring could sound.

“Abernathy,” he snapped brusquely.

“This is Fogarty, ITO-4198, reporting from Hazleton PD. Bullock is with the witness interrogating him now. Orders?” rasped a well-known male voice.

Refraining from asking what had taken him so long to call with his report, Abernathy replied, “Send a squad to Passaic, New Jersey, and a second to Wyckoff, to contact the local LEOs and keep an eye and ear out for anything related to the target. She has history in both places and, given the route she’s taken, it seems likely she’s headed to familiar territory.”

He heard Fogarty barking the appropriate orders into a crackling walkie-talkie before responding to him.

“Dorner and Reisberg are heading there now with six men each,” Fogarty reported.

Although he knew that seven men would not be sufficient to bring Shepard in if she chose to resist, Abernathy believed that they would be able to keep her engaged long enough for reinforcements to arrive. However, he hoped that she would return to the Institute willingly. The cross-country journey in a beat-up old car with little money to spend could not have been pleasant for her, and now that her face had been distributed to law enforcement agencies nationwide as a wanted criminal, it would only get worse for her.

“Keep me updated.”

“Roger that, Director. Anything else?” Fogarty asked.

“Find her,” he gritted out through clenched teeth.

Returning the phone to its cradle, lightly this time in an attempt to prevent the pain that he had experienced earlier when slamming it down from returning, Abernathy waited impatiently for Bullock to report to him with the results of the filling station clerk’s interrogation. Less than an hour passed before the phone rang again, but with his nerves so on-edge it felt like far longer.

When he answered and announced himself, Bullock’s words did little to calm him.

“It definitely was Shepard,” the tall, heavyset operative declared, an image of the bulky, dark-eyed, deeply tanned man with his low, jutting brow, forming in Abernathy’s mind as he spoke. “And it seems she’s out of money. He was reluctant to admit he did it, but she told the clerk that she only had five dollars left and gave him some sob story about escaping an abusive situation - and she said she was going home to her mother. He felt sorry for her, gave her a bag of snacks for free, and he even paid for the gas outta his own pocket.”

Even while hearing the clear disdain for how easily Shepard had tricked the clerk in Bullock’s voice, the Director felt slightly affronted at the gentle and very well thought out care that she had received at the Institute being compared to an abusive relationship. Had the power that Shepard possessed not been so terrifying, he did not doubt that many of his staff would have come to see her as a sort of daughter figure, especially given that she still had been a teenager when he first brought her from the locked psychiatric ward in New Jersey to his facility in Nebraska, and even now, five years later, she still looked so fresh-faced and innocent. Although none had admitted to it, he still suspected that some of the older nurses had viewed her thusly prior to her escape and not merely as a potentially deadly research subject, as the doctors and he himself did. There was no doubt in his mind that Miller, the nurse on duty the night of her escape, had dropped his guard with her over the years, and that it was more her own shyness and reticence in engaging in social interaction than any caution upon Miller’s part, or that of the rest of the staff charged with her care, that had prevented a stronger emotional bond from forming between them and her.

He was very glad of this reluctance upon her part to develop and build relationships; otherwise, Abernathy did not doubt that she could have manipulated one or more of the staff into assisting her in her escape. Yes, he  _ would _ have gotten the truth out of her co-conspirators, he was certain, as the founding documents that had created the covert, quasi-governmental agency specifically exempted it from any national or international rules and conventions regarding torture, but he preferred not to resort to such crass methods of interrogation if they could be avoided. This mostly was because confessions extracted under such duress were so notoriously unreliable, not to mention the mess it left behind. He preferred to utilise more subtle methods of extracting information. But, he had been worried about the effects housing a very pretty but  _ exceptionally  _ dangerous young woman might have upon his staff ever since he began preparing the facility for her arrival over six years ago. And Shepard’s allegedly easy manipulation of the filling station clerk amply proved to him the validity of his concerns.

_ If only she looked like what she actually is - a dangerous being that might not even truly be  _ human _ in the strictest sense, despite her appearance. Why couldn’t she  _ look _ like a monster, like all of the reports regarding Voorhees state that he did? Even from birth, his twisted, malformed features had told anyone who saw him exactly what he was, and yet Shepard looked like a perfectly ordinary young woman. Delicate. Helpless, even.  _

It was intensely disturbing to consider.  _ Could there be many other beings like her out there, ones with immense, immeasurable power but that could pass as easily as she did for fully human and “normal”? _

The thought that there might be a large number of others like her, capable of blending in with normal society and therefore going through their lives undiscovered, actually chilled him, and he could feel a shiver running down his spine.

On the other hand, Abernathy was relieved to hear that Shepard had told the clerk that she was going “home”, taking that as a confirmation that she indeed was travelling to northern New Jersey. He now had faith that Reisberg, Dorner, and their men would be able to find her quickly, wherever she had chosen to go.

“Good,” he replied. “Did he observe anything else?”

“No, Sir. The clerk said she looked really exhausted and didn’t say much at all after lying to him about why she was only getting five dollars of gas ‘cept to thank him,” Bullock explained. 

Actually pleased by the news that Shepard was visibly wearing out, and hoping that it meant that she would stop driving soon and try to find a place where she could stay, Abernathy did not even have to think before issuing the next set of orders. 

“Rendezvous with the operatives at HCPD then split into two groups - one to join the search and recovery team in Wyckoff, New Jersey, and the other to join the team in Passaic.”

“Consider it done, Sir.”

Viewing her escape as an infuriating sort of insubordination, Abernathy found the unquestioning obedience of the field operatives charged with finding her to be a refreshing counterpoint to Shepard’s recent behaviour. 

“I expect an immediate report if you hear or see anything at all that might be related to the target,” the Director demanded. 

Almost before the command was complete, Bullock replied, “Of course, Sir.”

His mind buzzing with ideas, Abernathy dropped the phone back into its cradle, terminating the call. It was difficult to fathom how Shepard had been able to plan and effect her escape, and her ability to stay several hours ahead of his best teams had him hovering upon the edge of being outright enraged. Nothing in her psychological profile remotely indicated that she would have been a flight risk. Neither had it been anyone’s impression that she would be so capable of evading capture.

_ She seemed like such a nice, compliant young woman.  _ Seemed being the operative word.

_ But we’re closing in on you, _ he silently gloated. It might be the fifth day since her escape, but he felt almost completely certain that now, he  _ knew _ her end destination - and he had men on their way to apprehend her. Everything was falling into place, and all that he had to do at this point was to wait to hear that Shepard was back in custody … or that she was terminated.

It was several hours after he had hung up the phone again when Abernathy experienced a flash of concern. Allegedly, the target had told the clerk that she was going to be with her mother - but Amanda Shepard was dead, one of the sixteen people apparently slaughtered by Voorhees that disastrous, blood-drenched weekend when Crews brought the older Shepard woman and her daughter back to Crystal Lake. There were notes interspersed sporadically throughout Shepard’s file noting periods of passive suicidal ideation - nothing indicating that she had any plan or intent to act thereupon, but he could not help wondering if she might have given up, if seeking her death might have been the purpose behind her escape all along. After all, she had to know that his staff would have done anything and everything within their power to keep her alive - even though she had never been told the full extent of the purpose of her stay at the Institute, Shepard was a smart woman. She was important to them as a research subject, as she undoubtedly would have discerned early on during what amounted to her incarceration there. It was obvious that they wanted her alive; otherwise, they would have attempted to terminate her life. They even tried to keep her content. He experienced no difficulty in admitting to himself that their motive for doing so was far from altruistic and had no basis whatsoever in care for her as a “person” - that, instead, it was due to her being an invaluable and likely irreplaceable object to study and use, but that would not have rendered their efforts to prevent her death ineffective.

And that was when a startling thought entered his mind.  _ If Shepard were planning to join her mother in death, might she have returned to Crystal Lake in spite of her expressed horror of the place where everyone to whom she had ever been close had been killed? _

The puzzle pieces tumbling through Abernathy’s mind fell into place; they seemed to fit.

Picking up the phone once more, he hurriedly punched in Fogarty’s satellite phone extension from memory.

“Any sightings of the target?”

“No, Sir,” came the staticky reply.

Unsurprised to hear that report, Abernathy barked, “Gather together all the operatives who can be in Passaic County within four hours’ time, make sure that every single one has a full supply of tranquiliser darts in addition to the standard armaments, then get to Site Alpha in Wessex County and call in for further orders  _ immediately _ .”

“Yes, Sir!” Fogarty declared, and the Director could hear the excitement, the  _ relish _ in the fresh-faced but experienced team leader’s voice.

With a faint, smugly satisfied smile, Abernathy hung up the phone and settled back into his chair to wait.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this chapter took me for-freaking-ever to complete. I kept coming up with more ideas for fleshing out the true villains of this happy little story - and getting to spend Hallowe’en weekend with Kane Hodder just added to the whirlwind of thoughts. He’s an amazing man.
> 
> Apologies for the delay! 
> 
> No, this chapter wasn’t filler. Yes, we shall be returning to our heroine and hero in the next chapter, which has been started.


End file.
